Search for lepton flavour violation with the first data of the mu3e experiment

The mu3e experiment searches for a rare flavour violating decay of the muon to three electrons. The decay is highly suppressed in the standard model and any observation of signal will be a herald of new physics. The experiment is currently under construction in the Paul-Scherrer Institute in Switzerland by an international collaboration and is scheduled to take its very first data in 2020. This PhD thesis will take place within the Liverpool mu3e group, which currently leads the UK participation in the experiment and mu3e tracker construction. The group also contributes to the development of the experiment software framework. The thesis topic will focus on the commissioning of the tracker towards the first data taking, the understanding of the mu3e detector performance and the analysis of the very first data. In addition to contributing to the very first results on the mu->3e decay, the student will explore the possibility of expanding the experiment's physics potential by developing and optimizing software for the GPU farm to select and analyse in real time mu->eeeX decays, where X is a new particle, e.g. a new neutral boson or a dark photon. The student will also have the opportunity to explore the interconnections of the sensitivity to these particles with results from other experiments in the lepton sector and the LHC.