A study of direct $CP$-violation in charged B-meson decays with the LHCb experiment

The LHCb experiment, operating at the Large Hadron Collider, is studying b-hadrons produced in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7$\:$TeV. The LHCb detector consists of millions of detector elements and to manage these elements an industrial supervisory control and data acquisition system is used. The implementation of the Ring-Imaging Cherenkov sub-detector's off-detector electronics configuration and monitoring within this framework is described. The proton-proton collisions can last for periods of several hours and the real-time monitoring of the recorded data ensures that the detector performance does not degrade during this time. In this thesis the algorithms providing the real-time monitoring of the detector elements of the LHCb Ring-Imaging Cherenkov sub-detector are presented. A measurement of the $\mathcal{CP}$-asymmetry in B$^{\pm}$ decays is used to test the predictions of the Standard Model and to search for signs of new physics. A method to extract the $\mathcal{CP}$-asymmetry in B$^{\pm}$ $\rightarrow$ $\phi$K$^{\pm}$ and B$^{\pm}$ $\rightarrow$ $\phi\pi^{\pm}$ decays using B$^{\pm}$ $\rightarrow$ J$\!/\!\psi$K$^{\pm}$ and B$^{\pm}$ $\rightarrow$ J$\!/\!\psi\pi^{\pm}$ decays respectively as control channels is presented. With a data set of 1$\:$fb$^{-1}$ a measurement of the $\mathcal{CP}$-asymmetry in the B$^{\pm}$ $\rightarrow$ $\phi$K$^{\pm}$ channel should provide the world's best measurement. The B$^{\pm}$ $\rightarrow$ $\phi\pi^{\pm}$ channel is as yet undetected and it is expected that evidence for this channel could be found in a 2$\:$fb$^{-1}$ data set, based on a prediction from the Standard Model. Finally, using a data set containing an integrated luminosity of 37$\:$pb$^{-1}$ the ratio of branching fractions $\mathcal{B}\!\left(\mathrm{B}^{\pm}\mathrm{ }\rightarrow\mathrm{ J}\!/\!\psi\pi^{\pm}\right)\!/\mathcal{B}\!{}\left(\mathrm{B}^{\pm}\mathrm{ }\rightarrow\mathrm{ J}\!/\!\psi\mathrm{K}^{\pm}\right)$ is measured as $0.051\pm0.005\left(\mathrm{stat.}\right)\pm0.03\left(\mathrm{syst.}\right)$ and an upper limit of $<0.13$ at the $90\:\%$ confidence level has been set for the ratio of branching fractions $\mathcal{B}\!\left(\mathrm{B}^{\pm}\mathrm{ }\rightarrow\mathrm{ }\phi\pi^{\pm}\right)\!/\mathcal{B}\!{}\left(\mathrm{B}^{\pm}\mathrm{ }\rightarrow\mathrm{ }\phi\mathrm{K}^{\pm}\right)$.