In the millennia of recorded human knowledge, no model for describing the workings of Nature is as elegant or complete as the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM). However, the SM has several open questions and there exist multiple phenomena that it cannot explain. A pressing question is related to the mass of the Higgs boson, whose value the SM has no natural way of explaining, relying instead on the fine tuning of parameters to one part in 10^{28}. Many extensions of the SM propose new interactions and particles which solve this problem. A particularly common theme is that of new partners of the top quark, which in some models are fermionic and have vectorial couplings to the SM charged weak current. Such particles are referred to as vector-like quarks and represent a promising avenue of research. A search is presented for a vector-like quark with an exotic 5/3 charge (in units of the charge of the positron), referred to as an X5/3 particle. These particles are predicted in Composite Higgs theories, which rely on the masses of the X5/3 to be not more than ~2 TeV in order to solve the unnaturalness inherent in the mass of the Higgs boson. The search uses data collected by the CMS experiment in both 2015 and 2016 consisting of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the CERN LHC. No significant excess of events is seen above the predicted background and limits are placed on the mass of the new top quark partner at 95% confidence level, excluding masses less than 1200 (1160) GeV for X5/3 particles that decay with right-handed (left-handed) couplings to W bosons. These are the most stringent limits to date on the mass of the X5/3 particle in this final state.

A search for new phenomena in final states with one or more energetic jets and large missing transverse momentum, ETmissT, is presented. An integrated luminosity of 20 fb-1 is collected from √s = 8 TeV pp collisions at the LHC with the ATLAS detector during 2012 operations. A selection criteria is imposed requiring events to have monojet signatures, with ETmissT > 350 GeV and no identified leptons. Standard Model backgrounds and systematics uncertainties are estimated using a maximum likelihood procedure. The number of events passing this selection criteria is in good agreement with Standard Model expectations. These events are then divided up into three orthogonal signal regions based on the outputs of two Random Forest classifiers trained to classify invisible decays of the Higgs boson produced through the vector boson fusion and Higgs-strahlung production modes. These results are then interpreted in terms of three different Higgs-portal models and translated into upper limits on WIMP-nucleon cross-sections for comparison with direct detection experiments. / Graduate

A measurement using the ATLAS detector has been made of the fraction of events in proton-proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV that do not contain additional jets in the rapidity region bounded by a di-jet system. This provided a strong test of perturbative QCD in the new energy regime of the Large Hadron Collider. Additional measurements have been made of the mean jet multiplicity in the rapidity bounded region and using a variety of different event selections. These observation were compared to recent next to leading order dijet predictions produced by POWHEG and a variety of leading order generators.

For the first time, the Z0 boson angular distribution in the center-of-momentum frame is measured in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(S) = 7 TeV at the CERN LHC. The data sample, recorded with the CMS detector, corresponds to an integrated luminosity of approximately 36 pb-1. Events in which there is a Z0 and at least one jet, with a jet transverse momentum threshold of 20 GeV and absolute jet rapidity less than 2.4, are selected for the analysis. Only the Z0’s muon decay channel is studied. Within experimental and theoretical uncertainties, the measured angular distribution is in agreement with next-to-leading order perturbative QCD predictions.

Exploiting the substructure of jets observed at the LHC to better understand and interpret the experimental data has recently been a very active area of research. In this thesis we study the substructure of high-pt QCD jets, which form a background to many new physics searches. In particular, we explore in detail the perturbative distributions of a certain class of observables known as non-global jet shapes. More specifically, we identify and present state-of-the-art calculations, both at fixed-order and to all-orders in the perturbative expansion, of a set of large logarithms known as non-global logarithms. Hitherto, these logarithms have been largely mis-treated, and in many cases ignored, in the literature despite being first pointed out more than a decade ago. Our work has triggered the interest of many groups, particularly Soft and Collinear Effective Theory (SCET) groups, and led to a flurry of papers on non-global logarithms and related issues. Although our primary aim is to provide analytical results for hadron-hadron scattering environments, it is theoretically instructive to consider the simpler case of e+e- annihilation. We thus examine, in chapters 4, 5 and 6, the the said jet shapes in the latter environment and compute the full next-to-leading logarithmic resummation of the large logarithms present in the distribution for various jet definitions. We exploit the gained experience to extend our calculations to the more complex hadronic environment in chapter 7. We provide state-of-the-art resummation of the jet mass observable in vector boson + jet and dijet QCD processes at the LHC up to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. The resultant distribution of the former (vector boson + jet) process agrees well, after accounting for hadronisation corrections, with standard Monte Carlo event generators and potential comparisons to data from the LHC will be made soon.

The theoretical development of the Standard Model in the 1960s and 1970s has led to the discovery of its missing piece, the Higgs boson, at the ATLAS experiment (together with its sister experiment, CMS) at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012. In order to solve the problem of large quantum corrections to the leading expansion of the Higgs boson mass, additional symmetries need to be added to the Standard Model. A possible solution to this problem of Higgs mass quantum corrections is the theory of Supersymmetry, which includes partners to each Standard Model particle, such as gluinos, squarks, and the lightest supersymmetric particle. This dissertation describes a search for pair-produced gluinos, where each gluino decays via a top squark or a bottom squark to the lightest supersymmetric particle (a neutralino). Events which contain a large jet multiplicity in the final state (i.e. at least four jets of which at least three must be b-jets), and large amounts of missing transverse energy, are obtained for further studies. The dataset used for this search includes 139 fb^−1 of integrated luminosity recorded by the ATLAS experiment between 2015 and 2018 at a center-of-mass energy √s = 13 TeV. No significant excess is observed in data above the Standard Model backgrounds, and gluino masses up to 2.3 TeV for both the Gtt and the Gbb models are excluded at a 95% confidence level. This dissertation also contains an overview of, and the author’s work on, the data quality monitoring of the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeter during 2017 data taking. / Graduate

Title: Study of fake-tau background with the ATLAS experiment Author: Gabriela Martinovicová Institute: Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics Supervisor: Mgr. Vojtěch Pleskot, Ph.D., Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics Abstract: The τ-leptons are the important final-state components, not only in the Standard Model processes but also in the processes beyond the Standard Model studied at the ATLAS experiment at CERN. They are characterized by mostly decaying into hadrons with one or three charged particles and, in most cases, with at least one neutral pion in the final-state. Due to their short decay length, only their decay products are observed in the detector. Jets naturally fake hadronically decaying τ leptons, so it is necessary to estimate such a fake-τ background. The Fake Factor method uses a correction factor, called fake factor (FF), measured from the data and applied to the data to estimate the fake-τ background in a given signal region. One of the complications is that FF differs for τ candidates faked by jets derived from quarks or gluons and thus must be measured in the control region with the same fraction of quark jets as in the signal region. The solution to this problem is the universal FF method, which proposed that from the FFs measured in samples with a large difference in the...

Title: Partonic showers and jets Author: Ondřej Hladík Department: Institute of Theoretical Physics MFF UK Supervisor: Mgr. Alexander Kupčo, Ph.D., Institute of Physics ASCR, v. v. i. Abstract: In the present thesis we compare experimentally measured differential and integrated jets shapes with predictions of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at the second order (NLO) of perturbative expansion. The measured jet sha- pes were taken from ATLAS experiment at LHC in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy √ s = 7 TeV and were compared with these predictions. The jets were reconstructed by means of anti-kT jet algorithm with R = 0.6. The predictions at NLO QCD agree with data in wider kinematics region than predictions at leading order (LO). The agreement, however, is still in some kine- matical regions not satisfactory. Keywords: QCD, jets, jet shapes, LHC

This thesis presents a study of W±Z diboson production with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The measurements are made using 20.3fb⁻¹ of data collected during proton-proton collisions produced at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 8 TeV. Final states with three leptons and missing transverse energy are considered. The first study of the polarisation of the W boson in such events is presented. This study provides a cross-section independent method by which to study anomalous gauge boson couplings. The estimated sensitivity of this measurement to anomalous gauge boson couplings will therefore also be presented. Also discussed, are measurements of the W±Z production cross-section and limits on anomalous gauge boson couplings. Finally, a study is presented which assess the impact of extending the inner-detector tracker to |η| = 4.0. This was considered for the ATLAS upgrade program. The effect of such an extension was studied for multiple final states, including the W±Z inclusive and VBS analyses as well as the WWW triboson analysis.

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