Measurement of the gluon polarisation from open-charm production at COMPASS

The main purpose of the COMPASS experiment at CERN is the determination of the gluon contribution to the nucleon spin. To achieve this goal, COMPASS uses a naturally polarised muon beam with an energy of 160 GeV and a fixed polarised target. Two types of materials were used as a target: 6LiD (polarised deuterons) in 2002-2006 and NH3 (polarised protons) in 2007. The gluons in the nucleon can be accessed directly via the Photon Gluon Fusion (PGF) process. Among the channels studied by COMPASS, the production of open-charm mesons is the one that tags a PGF interaction in the most clean and efficient way. This thesis presents an estimation of the gluon polarisation, G/G, which is based on a measurement of the spin asymmetry resulting from the production of D0 mesons. These mesons are reconstructed through the invariant mass of their decay products. The purity of the D0 mass spectra was significantly improved through the use of a new method based on Neural Networks. The G/G result is also presented using the next-to-leading order (NLO-QCD) corrections to the PGF process. Such corrections are relevant and were for the first time applied to an experimental measurement of the gluon polarisation.