Analysis of orbitally excited B-mesons

This thesis reports on the study of orbitally excited B** mesons in DELPHI b-events taken in the years 1994 to 2000 with the DELPHI detector at the LEP collider. The analyses presented represent the result of applying much improved and extended techniques of spectroscopy since the first DELPHI publication in 1995. A major improvement has occurred in the area of particle identification, where a neural network approach has been implemented in the DELPHI software package. Developments in the area of neural networks have led to much improved enrichment of the excited B states. The Bˆ{**} neural networks identify, on a track-by-track basis, the decay pion/kaon originating from the Bˆ{**} decay, suppressing background and keeping signal events in an efficient way. To improve detector resolution, a further application of neural networks has been applied to reconstruct the underlying Q-value. The corresponding network gives a correction on existing measurements of the Q-value in the form of a probability density function, thus not only giving the most probable value for the true quantity but also providing a measurement error. This allows a selection of well measured candidates to be involved in the analysis. New, precise measurements of the Bu** and Bd** mesons concerning the mass of the narrow states are reported. Bs** mesons are shown to decay into B and K mesons and their properties are measured.