Exotic particle searches with ALICE at the LHC

Abstract

Exotic particles such as “tertaquarks” and “pentaquarks” were pre- dicted very long ago (1964) but the trend to find their experimental evi- dence is recent. One such pentaquark was discovered recently in the STAR experiment but due to the less statistical significance the results were not promising enough. Now, the tracks which go through the ALICE experi- ment are way higher in number than the STAR experiment. So, the higher number of tracks signifies much higher statistics to deal with and to get a much larger statistical significance. The pentaquark which we are dealing with decays in the following manner N 0 Λ+ Ks0. Now, talking about the daughters. These daughter particles are called “V0 Particles” because of their decay shape. Then those decayed particles can be identified by PID method which uses the Bethe-Bloch for- mula. This can be done either directly or by their decayed products using the invariant mass reconstruction. We have tried both the approaches to find the invariant mass of both Λ and Ks0. Then the invariant mass plots were fitted with Gaussian curve to get the particle’s mass and width.