In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), particle physics events are created by colliding high energy proton beams at a number of interaction points around the ring. One of the main performance indicating parameters of the LHC is the luminosity. The luminosity is limited by, amongst other things, the strength of the beam-beam interaction. In this thesis, the effect of the beam-beam interaction on the luminosity performance of the LHC and the proposed High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is investigated. Results from a number of dedicated, long-range beam-beam machine studies are presented and analysed. In these studies, the minimum beam-beam separation for two different beta star— optics are identified. This separation defines the minimum operational crossing angle in the LHC. The data from these studies are then compared to simulation of the dynamic aperture and the results are discussed. In addition to studies of the LHC, an analytical approach is derived in order to describe the hourglass effect, which may become a contributing factor in limiting the luminosity performance of the HL-LHC.

As part of the Large Hadron Collider high luminosity upgrade it is proposed to include crab cavities and large aperture niobium tin final focussing magnets in the lattice in order to enhance the luminosity. In this thesis the dynamics of a proposed cavity design were considered in terms of their impact upon the dynamic aperture of the machine. Taylor maps for the cavity were created and used to perform this analysis with a full assessment of their validity. A set of symplectic thin cavity models were also developed and cross checked with the Taylor maps. Finally, dynamic aperture studies were performed using these models in order to determine which components of the crab cavity dynamics are important when considering the long term stability of the beam in the LHC upgrade. It is shown that crab cavities exhibit little impact on the LHC beam stability. For the final focussing magnets a preliminary study was conducted into the importance of including their fringe fields in a model of the LHC upgrade. A technical study was carried out into developing a symplectic model which was compatible with the current magnet models use for dynamic aperture studies. A preliminary dynamic aperture study was performed with the inclusion of fringe fields for the final focussing magnets from which the fringe fields are shown to have a negative impact on the long term beam stability.

This thesis presents the measurement of the differential cross section of the top-antitop pair production in proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV at the ATLAS experiment. The measurement is performed for top-antitop events in the single lepton decay channel in the boosted topol- ogy. The measured differential cross section is expressed as a function of the top quark transverse momentum at particle level and at parton level. The mea- sured distributions are compatible with the theoretical predictions of the Standard Model. The experimental techniques used in this measurement are discussed with emphasis on the jet reconstruction and on the identification of jets originating from b-quark fragmentation. The jet reconstruction is influenced by simultane- ous proton-proton collisions (pileup), and the mitigation of these pileup effects is studied. A novel pileup subtraction technique for jets is proposed using an ex- tension of the methods currently being employed by the LHC experiments. The new method has a good performance in removing the pileup contributions at the level of jet constituents. 1

Cette thèse a pour sujet la mesure de la section efficace de production de paires de quarks top-antitop dans l’expérience CMS auprès du LHC. L’état final considéré est le canal semi-leptonique ”tau+jets”. Un boson W issu de la désintégration du quark top se désintègre en un tau hadronique et neutrino tandis que le second boson W se désintègre en une paire quark-antiquark. La conduite de cette analyse a nécessité le développement d’un nouveau mode de déclenchement des données (trigger) incluant la présence de quatre jets dont un identifié en tant que tau hadronique. La configuration de ce trigger ainsi que son efficacité ont été étudiés dans cette thèse. Un échantillon de données correspondant à 3.9 fb−1 a été enregistré avec ce trigger et analysé. Les leptons taus ont été reconstruits grâce à un algorithme identifiant leurs résonances intermédiaires tandis que les jets de quarks beaux issus de la désintégration des quarks tops ont été identifiés grâce à l’algorithme ”probabilité par jet”. Cet algorithme pour lequel j’ai mis en oeuvre une procédure de calibration depuis 2009 utilise le paramètre d’impact des traces de particules chargées pour calculer leur probabilité de venir du vertex primaire. Des études de performance de cet algorithme sont également présentées dans cette thèse. Afin de séparer le signal de l’important bruit de fond majoritairement constitué des processus multijets QCD et W+jets un réseau de neurones utilisant des variables dites d’environnement (aplanarité, HT, M(τ,jets), énergie transverse manquante...) a été développé. La section efficace a été extraite à l’aide d’un ajustement par méthode du maximum de vraisemblance de la sortie du réseau de neurones. Les incertitudes systématiques ont fait l’objet d’une étude détaillée. La valeur de la section efficace mesurée, σ(top-antitop) = 156 ± 12 (stat.) ± 33 (syst.) ± 3 (lumi) pb, est en accord avec la section efficace prédite par le modèle standard. / In this thesis we present the first measurement in the CMS experiment of the top-antitop production cross section in the tau+jets final state. To perform this measurement we designed a specific trigger requiring the presence of four jets, one of them being identified as an hadronic tau. The performance of this trigger has been studied in this thesis. A dataset of 3.9 fb-1 was collected with this trigger and analyzed. At offline level we needed to apply a sophisticated tau identification technique to identify the tau jets, based on the reconstruction of the intermediate resonances of the hadronic tau decay modes. Another crucial point was the b-jet identification, both to identify the b-jets in the final state and to modelize the background using a data driven technique. The studies done on the b-tag algorithms along the PhD period are also presented with particular attention to the ”Jet Probability” algorithm. It is the algorithm for which I performed the calibration since 2009 as well as the one used to tag the b-jets from the top decays. A neural network has been developed to separate the top-antitop events from the W+jets and multijet backgrounds. A binned likelihood fit to the neural network output distribution is done in order to extract the signal contribution from the background. A detailed estimation of the systematic uncertainties on the cross section measurement is also presented. The result for the cross section measurement, σ(tt) = 156 ± 12 (stat.) ± 33 (syst.) ± 3 (lumi) pb, is in perfect agreement with the standard model expectation.