Measurement of gluon polarization through spin asymmetry in the production of charmed mesons

The main aim of the COMPASS experiment is the measurement of the gluon polarization in the nucleon, which can be accessed by the spin asymmetry in the scattering of a polarized muon beam on a polarized nucleon target. The process sensitive to the gluon polarization is the photon-gluon fusion, which can be tagged in the cleanest way by looking at the production of D0 mesons. At COMPASS, D0 mesons are reconstructed from the invariant mass of their decay products. However, it is a rare process, dominated by a large combinatorial background. This thesis presents some studies devoted to the improvement of the charmed mesons reconstruction. The measurement of the efficiency and the space resolution of the 3 drift chamber stations of the COMPASS spectrometer is a necessary step in understanding the performances of the reconstruction of particle trajectories. The hadron identification, which is fundamental in the reconstruction of charmed meson decay, is performed by a RICH detector. A statistical treatment of signal and background, together with an upgrade project to replace the present front-end electronics, have been developed in order to improve the particle identification performances. The second part of this work concerns the spin asymmetry measurement, which requires the application of event selection criteria in order to minimize the noise over signal ratio in the D0 invariant mass, and the development of event-weighting methods to reduce the statistical error. This work presents a preliminary result, based on 2002-2004 statistics, which is the ΔG/G measurement from open charm production. Although the error bars are large, the measured gluon polarization is compatible with zero. Given the present accuracy, this result is compatible with the existing direct measurements from other channels. However, it does not allow to distinguish between different theoretical models. (author)