In particular, my research focused on electromagnetic calorimetry and sensitivity studies for heavy right-handed Majorana neutrinos at the ATLAS experiment — a general-purpose detector used to record and analyse proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in Geneva.
I studied the performance of the ATLAS presampler, a thin active layer of liquid argon aiming at correcting for the energy losses upstream of the electromagnetic calorimeter. For this purpose, I used full simulation and reconstruction of single-particle events and I analysed data collected during a test-beam at CERN in 1997.
In the Standard Model, parity violation in the weak interaction is introduced by hand and neutrinos are massless. The Left-Right Symmetric Model restores parity at high energies by extending the electroweak gauge group of the Standard Model and thereby introducing three new gauge bosons. Together with the See-Saw mechanism, it can explain the lightness of left-handed neutrinos at the cost of introducing heavy right-handed Majorana neutrinos. I performed sensitivity studies for the production of new gauge bosons decaying into right-handed Majorana neutrinos in ATLAS.