A SEARCH FOR A STABLE SIX-QUARK BOUND STATE IN P-P COLLISIONS AT √ S = 13 TEV IN PARKED 2018 DATA AT CMS AND A STUDY OF THE AGING OF CATHODE STRIP CHAMBERS IN HIGH RADIATION ENVIRONMENTS.
Abstract: A search for a Standard Model dibaryonic dark matter candidate being produced in 13 TeV proton-proton collisions and annihilating with a neutron in the beam-pipe of the CMS detector is described herein. The search is to conducted in over 230 billion collisions collected in 2018 by the CMS detector, targeting the strange neutral hadrons that would be produced in such an annihilation. A custom vertex reconstruction is used, and a multivariate discriminator is trained to distinguish between the signal and a combinatorial background. Additionally, results from a study of the aging of detector components in Cathode Strip Chambers in high radiation environments with reduced Carbon Tetrafluoride gas mixtures are also presented.