Search for the supersymmetric partner of the top quark and measurements of cluster properties in the silicon strip tracker of the CMS experiment at Run 2

This thesis presents three different studies based on the CMS Run 2 data. The first two are measurements of the cluster properties in the CMS silicon strip tracker related respectively to the highly ionizing particles (HIP) and the charge sharing among neighboring strips (also known as cross talk). The last topic discussed in this document is the search for the supersymmetric partner of the top quark, called the stop. An increase in the hit inefficiency of the CMS silicon strip tracker was observed during the years 2015 and 2016. The highly ionizing particles were identified as a possible cause of these inefficiencies. This thesis brings qualitative and quantitative results on the HIP effect and its probability. The HIP was found not to be the largest source of inefficiency at that time and once the source was identified and fixed, the new data revealed that after this fix the HIP now represents the major source of the hit inefficiency. The second study presented in this thesis focuses on the conditions plugged in CMS tracker simulation in order to provide realistic results. These conditions change with the tracker operating conditions and also evolve with tracker ageing resulting from the radiation damage. We identified that the outdated cross talk parameters largely impact the cluster width and seed charge. In this thesis the parameters were remeasured and it was confirmed that the new parameters largely improve the agreement of clusters between data and simulation. The last part describes deeply the stop analysis using data recorded in 2016 (corresponding to  L = 35.9 fb−1) with single lepton in the final state. No excess was observed in the full 2016 data ( L = 35.9 fb−1) with respect to the standard model background predictions and therefore exclusion limits in terms of simplified model spectra were derived.