A study of the feasibility of η′(958) reconstruction in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions and √sNN = 5.023 TeV p–Pb collisions at ALICE

This reports describes my findings for the analysis I performed for the ALICE Gamma Working Group as a CERN Summer Student from June 25th to September 21st, 2018. It is intended especially for any researcher that continues with η′ reconstruction in this working group, but also serves as a report for my home university. As such, the report is more elaborate than required for a CERN Summer Student Report. We adapted the existing meson reconstruction framework to reconstruction of η′(958) through the decay channels η′ → γγ and η′ → π+π−η and applied this framework to 1.5 billion pp √s = 13 TeV minimum bias events and 0.5 billion p–Pb √sNN = 5.023 TeV events. Despite the large statistics, η′ reconstruction in these data sets proved difficult, but the corresponding Monte Carlo simulations enabled us to formulate several strategies that will help improve the signal-to-background ratio and fit procedure.