Analysis of a Gluonic Penguin Decay with the BaBar Detector

This thesis presents a branching fraction analysis of the neutral B meson decay channel B → ϕK⁰_s where the K⁰_s decays to π⁰π⁰. The decay is dominated by gluonic penguin transitions, which have been very important for the main program of BABAR: the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. The decay channel has been established and is included in the CP analysis, which is sensitive to new physics. The data set consists of 227 million BB̅ pairs recorded by the BABAR detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Sophisticated analysis techniques have been applied primarily to suppress background from e⁺e^- → quark/anti-quark reactions. The analysis of such rare decay channels with BABAR relies on the availability of a large set of computer simulated data. For that purpose a computer cluster has been built at the University of Tennessee as part of the distributed computing support work for BABAR. The design and performance of the cluster is a main subject of this thesis work.