Graduate School in Physics and Astrophysics ------------------------------------------- ANNUAL REPORT ------------------------------------------- Fill with a text editor (without TAB or formatting) Repeat fields for each course as necessary. ------------------------------------------- name: Ksenia Shchelina email: shchelin@to.infn.it ciclo: XXXI year completed (1,2 or 3): 1 supervisor: Michele Arneodo ------------------------------------------- GRADUATE SCHOOL COURSES (only completed courses, with examination passed in the year) code: 06 title: Quantum Communication teacher: Degiovanni hours: 16 code: 09 title: Hands-on Fitting and Statistical Tools for Data Analysis teacher: Pelliccioni hours: 16 ------------------------------------------- SUMMER SCHOOLS, INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS (only those attended in the current year) title: The 2016 European School of High-Energy Physics School place: Skeikampen, Norway webpage: http://physicschool.web.cern.ch/PhysicSchool/ESHEP/ESHEP2016/ days: 14 talk or poster (Y/N): N ------------------------------------------- CONFERENCES, WORKSHOP (only those attended in the current year) title: 3rd Elba Workshop on Forward Physics @ LHC Energy place: La Biodola, Isola d'Elba, Italy webpage: https://indico.cern.ch/event/505807/ days: 3 talk or poster (Y/N): Y --------------------------------------------------- Research activity/Publications in the current year I started the year with a contribution to the processing, merging and validation of the joint CMS-Totem data taken in course of October 2015. After that I have been carrying out two physics analyses using these new data: o) The first is the search for exclusive chi_c meson production at 13 TeV, pp -->p chi_c p, with the chi_c decaying hadronically. I wrote the analysis code and developed the set of cuts for the signal extraction. In addition, this analysis required studies of the CMS tracking performance for low transverse momentum and low-multiplicity events: the non-standard running conditions entailed poor applicability of Run II tracking algorithms. To investigate this I spent several months understanding the features and behaviour of standard reconstruction along with possible alternatives, such as minimum-bias tracking and special tracking tunes carried out in collaboration with CMS tracking experts. o) My second ongoing analysis is on diffractive dijet production with proton tag: it aims at measuring the cross section of diffractive dijet production at 13 TeV as a function the fractional proton momentum loss, and the 4-momentum transfer squared at the proton vertex. The amount of collected statistics allows to measure doubly proton-tagged dijet events for the first time. I work on development of the analysis code and contribute to the creation of the joint CMS-Totem Monte-Carlo simulation. I am also taking part in the CMS-Totem Precision Proton Spectrometer (CT-PPS) project: 1) I served two weeks as the CT-PPS "detector on-call" expert. The "detector on-call" expert is required to take immediate reaction to any problems concerning CT-PPS during data taking. 2) I joined an analysis working group on the analysis of the first collected CT-PPS data, with the aim to validate the detector performance after commissioning. The analysis uses exclusive dimuon production as a reference process. It provides a clean, high-resolution sample in the central CMS detector, the properties of which can be matched to the results of direct final-state proton measurements in CT-PPS's Roman Pot detectors. The correlation plots that we obtained so far indicate that CT-PPS works as expected. They also lend support to the alignment and optics corrections, independently derived by the detector experts. 3) On the hardware side I started the work on the integration of the 3D pixel sensors into CT-PPS Data Acquisition system in collaboration with colleagues from Torino, Genova and CERN. Finally, in order to finalize my earlier CMS work, the 7 TeV Jet-gap-jet analysis paper draft was prepared -- the analysis is now ready for the CMS collaboration-wide review. [https://cds.cern.ch/record/2029345] The complete list of my publications in this year is available under this link https://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&p=Shchelina&of=hb&action_search=Search&sf=earliestdate&so=d