Date of Award

Summer 2012

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Engineering Physics

First Advisor

Markus Wobisch

Abstract

In a collision experiment involving highly energetic particles such as hadrons, processes at high momentum transfers can provide information useful for many studies involving Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). One way of analyzing these interactions is through angular distributions. In hadron-hadron collisions, the angular distribution between the two leading jets with the largest transverse momentum (pT) is affected by the production of additional jets. While soft radiation causes small differences in the azimuthal angular distribution of the two leading jets produced in a collision event, additional hard jets produced in the event have more pronounced influence on the distribution of the two leading jets produced in the collision. Thus, the dijet azimuthal angular distribution can serve as a variable that can be used to study the transition from soft to hard QCD processes in a collision event. This dissertation presents a triple-differential study involving the azimuthal angular distribution and the jet transverse momenta, and jet rapidities of the first two leading jets. The data used for this research are obtained from proton-antiproton (pp¯) collisions occurring at a center of mass energy of 1.96 TeV, using the DØ detector in Run II of the Tevatron Collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) in Illinois, USA. Comparisons are made to perturbative QCD (pQCD) predictions at next-to-leading order (NLO).

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