Charmed and beautiful: enhanced production of the B± c meson and R&D for the TORCH time-of-flight detector

This thesis presents the first measurement of the multiplicity-dependent production of the charmed-beauty meson at the Large Hadron Collider. Using data from the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment, it shows that the creation of the heavy charmed and beauty quarks depends on the nuclear environment of the collision. Since these heavy quarks are produced in separate interactions within the proton, this research opens up the possibility of probing the substructure of the proton: providing a new avenue to understand the structure of matter.