Studies of Possible QGP Estimators in proton-proton Collisions

Abstract: This thesis presents studies of three different Quark-Gluon Plasma estimators in proton-proton collisions using what is currently believed to be quark-gluon plasma observables; radial flow, elliptic flow and strangeness enhancement. The three tested estimators were Transverse Spherocity, an altered version of Transverse Spherocity where all p_T was put to one, and a newly developed estimator called Mid-Forward. The first part involved simulation studies where the estimators were tested using different settings within the Rope Hadronization framework in PYTHIA. The aim for this thesis was to find an estimator working for all three observables. However, this was not achieved as the results from the simulation study indicated that both spherocity estimators work well for the radial flow observable but not for elliptic flow, while the mid-forward estimator did not perform well for radial flow, it was the best candidate when measuring elliptic flow. Therefore the mid-forward estimator was selected for the data analysis of elliptic flow using two particle correlations. These results did not agree with what was observed in the results from the simulation studies, which could be due to low statistics in the data analysis.