Validation of simulation with enhanced kaon production to investigate kaon background for LDMX

Sammanfattning: Dark matter is one of our universe’s largest mysteries and very little is known about what it is. One of the dominating theories, that it originates from an early universe thermal relic, indicates that it has interaction with the Standard Model. If this is the case, dark matter can be produced at accelerators and detected indirectly by searching for missing momentum signals. LDMX will join this search for dark matter with a fixed target experiment at the LCLS-II electron beam line at SLAC starting in 2025. It will initially run with a beam energy of 4 GeV, to then increase the beam energy to 8 GeV in the following upgrades to improve the signal-to-background ratio. While searching for dark matter signals, rejecting background that might disturb the detection is crucial. In previous studies, it has been found that kaons, especially charged ones are the most difficult to filter out. The interactions that produce kaons are rare, so to investigate their behavior the production of kaons has been artificially boosted in a Geant4 simulation. This thesis will look closer into the kaons produced in simulations where the kaon production is boosted and the beam energy is increased to 8 GeV, to make sure that adding an enhancement factor will not introduce any unphysical or uncharacteristic behavior.