From Detector Development to New Physics Searches: CMS HGCAL Validation and Search for Top-Philic Resonances Using Variable-Radius Jet Tagging

This thesis presents two research works carried out within the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC): the system validation of the scintillator section of the High Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL), and a search for a heavy resonance coupling to top quarks and produced in association with top quark pairs in proton–proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 13 and 13.6 TeV. For the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) phase, the endcap calorimeters of CMS will be replaced by the HGCAL, a high-precision sampling calorimeter designed to cope with the extreme radiation and pileup conditions expected at the HL-LHC. In regions where radiation levels remain moderate, the hadronic section employs scintillator tiles coupled to silicon photomultipliers (SiPM-on-tile) as active materials. Each HGCAL tilemodule, the basic detector unit of this region, accommodates up to 144 SiPM-on-tile channels read out by dedicated front-end electronics. The performance of several tilemodules was evaluated during test-beam campaigns at the DESY-II facility using 3 GeV electron beams. The measurements serve to validate the response and uniformity of the detector components and to confirm that they meet the design specifications for HL-LHC operation. A search for a new heavy resonance that couples exclusively to top quarks and is produced in association with a top quark pair is presented. The analysis uses proton–proton collision data collected with the CMS detector at center-of-mass energies of 13 TeV (2016–2018) and 13.6 TeV (2022). The search targets the final state with two oppositely charged leptons from the W boson decays of the nonresonant top quarks, and two high-energy jets reconstructing the hadronically decaying resonant top quarks. In this scenario, the two top quarks from the resonance decay are expected to be highly Lorentz-boosted. Their hadronic decays are reconstructed using jets clustered with a variable-radius algorithm and identified with a dedicated top quark tagger based on a boosted decision tree (BDT). Events are selected in a final state containing opposite-sign leptons and b-tagged jets, and the resonance mass is reconstructed from pairs of tagged top jets. The analysis probes resonance masses between 500 GeV and 4 TeV and searches for local excesses in the reconstructed mass spectrum. The results are interpreted in the context of models with vector-like, scalar and pseudoscalar resonances produced in association with top quarks, representing the first such interpretation performed with CMS data.