Measurement of the $\Sigma^{+}$ production and the p-$\Sigma^{+}$ correlation function in proton-proton collisions with ALICE at the LHC

In the past decades, progress in the development of particle accelerators and detectors enabled scientists to study the production, interactions, and collective phenomena of many particle species in great detail. Ranging from light mesons to nuclei, even rare or short-lived probes could be measured over a broad range of collision energies. Nonetheless, data on one row of the baryon octet, the $\Sigma$ baryons, is scarce. In previous measurements, mostly the excited states of $\Sigma$ baryons were measured. Some results also exist on the $\Sigma^{0}$. The charged ground-state Σ baryons are, however, mostly unexplored. The only measurements of the $\Sigma^{+}$ production in high-energy collisions so far were performed by the DELPHI, OPAL, and L3 collaborations, which were all situated at the LEP collider at CERN and measured the $\Sigma^{+}$ in hadronic decays of the Z0 boson. The reason for the scarce data situation is that the charged ground-state $\Sigma$ baryons are extraordinarily challenging to measure, which will be discussed in detail in this thesis. The aforementioned measurements have been compared to different Monte Carlo event generators and showed sizeable deviations in the yield and shape of the obtained momentum spectra. It is well known that common event generators generally underpredict the production of strangeness, which also reflects in an underprediction of Σ baryons in these models. In this regard, the measurement of               $\Sigma^{+}$ cannot only provide a valuable cross check of the yields and spectral shape but also serve as an input to improve those models.