Doctor of Philosophy / Physics / Andrew G. Ivanov / In this thesis the measurement of production cross section of top-quark pairs in association with a photon in proton-proton collisions at a center of mass energy of 8 TeV is presented. The data was recorded at the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2012. This measurement aims to extend our knowledge of top quark properties and help to test consistency of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. Data-driven methods are used to estimate the photon identification efficiency and purity. The measured cross-section agrees with the standard model expectation.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Physics / Yurii Y. Maravin / This thesis presents the first study of a rare production of Z boson in association with two photons (Zγγ), where the Z boson decays into a pair of muons or electrons, by proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This study uses full data samples that have been collected with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector in 2012 with a center of mass energy of 8TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb⁻¹. The Zγγ production cross section is measured within a fiducial region defined by two leptons with two photons where transverse momentum over 15 GeV and distance between gamma and lepton above 0.4. Using the obtained samples, the Zγγ cross section is measured to be: 12.6 ±1.6 (stat.) ± 1.7 (syst.) ± 0.3 (lumi.) fb. where stat., syst., and lumi. denote the statistical uncertainty, systematic uncertainty, and the uncertainty in integrated luminosity, respectively. This result is in an excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction of 13.0 ± 1.5 fb.

No description available.

Ultra-relativisitic heavy ion collisions produce quark gluon plasma-a hot and dense soup of deconfined quarks and gluons akin to the early universe. We study two models in the context of these collisions namely, Polyakov Quark Meson Model (PQM) and Hadron Resonance Gas Model (HRGM).The PQM Model provides us with a simple and intuitive understanding of the QCD equation of state and thermodynamics at non zero temperature and baryon density while the HRGM is the principle model to analyse the hadron yields measured in these experiments across the entire range of beam energies. We study the effect of including the commonly neglected fermionic vacuum fluctuations to the (2+1) flavor PQM model. The conventional PQM model suffers from a rapid phase transition contrary to what is found through lattice simulations. Addition of the vacuum term tames the rapid transition and significantly improves the model’s agreement to lattice data. We further investigate the role of the vacuum term on the phase diagram. The smoothening effect of the vacuum term persists even at non zero . Depending on the value of the mass of the sigma meson, including the vacuum term results in either pushing the critical end point into higher values of the chemical potential or excluding the possibility of a critical end point altogether. We compute the fluctuations(correlations) of conserved charges up to sixth(fourth) order. Comparison is made with lattice data wherever available and overall good qualitative agreement is found, more so for the case of the normalised susceptibilities. The model predictions for the ratio of susceptibilities approach to that of an ideal gas of hadrons as in HRGM at low temperatures while at high temperature the values are close to that of an ideal gas of massless quarks. We examine the stability of HRGMs by extending them to take care of undiscovered resonances through the Hagedorn formula. We find that the influence of unknown resonances on thermodynamics is large but bounded. We model the decays of resonances and investigate the ratios of particle yields in heavy-ion collisions. We find that extending these models do not have much effect on hydrodynamics but the hadron yield ratios show better agreement with experiment. In principle HRGMs are internally consistent up to a temperature higher than the cross over temperature in QCD; but by examining quark number susceptibilities we find that their region of applicability seems to end even below the QCD cross over.

Le Modèle Standard de la physique des particules décrit trois des quatre interactions fondamentales et toutes ses prédictions ont été confirmées expérimentalement. Cependant, il reste encore des questions auxquelles le Modèle Standard ne peut répondre. Plusieurs pistes théoriques sont explorées et certaines prédisent de nouvelles particules se désintégrant en paire de quarks top-antitop qui pourraient être observé par le détecteur ATLAS auprès du collisionneur LHC.À partir de 2026, le LHC redémarrera après avoir fait l'objet d'une importante phase d'amélioration afin d'augmenter sa luminosité. C'est dans ce contexte que s'inscrivent les études réalisées sur FATALIC, une puce qui a été proposée pour le remplacement de l'électronique frontale du calorimètre hadronique à tuiles d'ATLAS. Les études ont montré que FATALIC est capable de reconstruire les paramètres d'un signal analogique en utilisant trois canaux de gain et un changement de gain dynamique. Les simulations ont démontré que les performances attendues de la voie rapide de FATALIC entraient dans les spécifications demandées.Ensuite, a été présentée une recherche de nouvelles résonances se désintégrant en paire de quarks top-antitop, utilisant 36,1 fb-1 de données issues des collisions proton-proton à 13 TeV au LHC pendant les années 2015 et 2016. Cette recherche s'est concentrée sur le canal de désintégration semi-leptonique de la paire top-antitop, où l'état final possède une signature comprenant exactement un lepton, des jets hadroniques et de l'énergie transverse manquante. L'estimation du bruit de fond multi-jets a été présentée en détail. Une recherche dans le spectre de masse invariante de la paire top-antitop a été effectuée pour les deux topologies résolue et boostée et la compatibilité des données par rapport aux prédictions du Modèle Standard a été testée. Aucune déviation significative par rapport aux prédictions du Modèle Standard n'a été trouvée et des limites sur les sections efficaces de production de signaux issus des modèles considérés furent mises.Les difficultés rencontrées lors de l'estimation des bruits de fond et du pré-traitement des incertitudes systématiques pour l'analyse à 36,1 fb-1 ont motivé la recherche d'une nouvelle méthode pour l'estimation du bruit de fond globale. L'algorithme Décomposition Fonctionnelle (FD) est une nouvelle méthode permettant de rechercher de nouvelles particules dans un spectre de masse invariante, en séparant la contribution du bruit de fond de celles des contributions résonantes. FD a été testé dans le but de vérifier ses performances sur des pseudo-données des analyses top-antitop et « 4t BSM ». Dans un premier temps, des tests ont été menés sur la propension de FD à créer de faux signaux dans les spectres de masses invariantes. La première version s'est montrée sensible à ce problème. FD a ensuite été amélioré pour réduire la sensibilité à la création de faux signal. Enfin, des études d'injections de signal ont été réalisées et FD a montré des difficultés à modéliser la contribution du signal et à la séparer du bruit de fond pour des largeurs de signal supérieures à 3%. / The Standard Model of particle physics describes three of the four fundamental interactions and all of its predictions have been experimentally confirmed. However, there are still questions that the Standard Model cannot answer. Several theoretical models are being explored and some predict new resonances that would decay into a top-antitop quarks pair that could be observed by the ATLAS detector at the LHC collider.In 2026, the LHC will restart after a significant improvement phase to increase its luminosity. It's in this context that the studies on FATALIC, a chip that has been proposed for the replacement of the front-end electronics of the ATLAS hadronic tile calorimeter, were achieved. The studies showed that FATALIC was able to reconstruct the parameters of an analog signal using three gain channels and a dynamic gain switch. The simulations showed that the expected performance of FATALIC's fast channel was within the required specifications.Then, a search for new particles decaying into a top-antitop quarks pair was presented, using 36.1 fb-1 data from the proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV of the LHC for the years 2015 and 2016. This search concentrate on the semi-leptonic decay channel of the top-antitop quarks pair, where the final state has a signature with exactly one lepton, hadronic jets and missing transverse energy. The estimate of the multi-jets background noise was presented. A search in the top-antitop invariant mass spectrum was performed in the two topology resolved and boosted and the compatibility of the data with respect to the Standard Model predictions was tested. No significant deviation from the Standard Model's predictions was found and limits on benchmark models signal cross sections were set.The difficulties encountered in estimating the background noises and on the profiling of the systematic uncertainties for the 36.1 fb-1 analysis has motivated the search for a new method to perform the global background estimate. The Functional Decomposition (FD) algorithm is a new method to search for new particles in an invariant mass spectrum, separating the contribution of the background noise to those of the resonant contributions. FD has been tested to verify its performance on pseudo-data from the top-antitop and « 4t BSM » analyses. First, tests were conducted to check if FD was creating spurious signal. The first version suffered of this problem and FD was then improved to reduce the amount of spurious signal. Finally, signal injection studies were carried out and FD showed difficulties to model the signal's contribution and to separate it from the background noise for signal with widths greater than 3%.