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Studies of minimum bias events at colliders probe the behavior of QCD in the non-perturbative regime. The phenomenology of events in this regime is described by empirical models that take many parameters, which all need to be tuned to the observed data. Measurements based on angular correlations between the highest transverse momentum charged particle track and the other charged particle tracks in collision events can, because of their robustness against experimental and detector effects, be a component of the tuning inputs for the models. We measure such observables in a variety of pseudorapidity ranges and at many center-of-mass energies at DØ and ATLAS. We observe that such observables are poorly described by current models and tunes that are used to produce simulated event samples, making them valuable information for the tuning process. The Matrix Element method is a powerful analysis tool to extract precise measurements from data samples of limited statistics. We have investigated the potential of the Matrix Element method to measure the mass of the charged Higgs in the exclusive decay H±→τ±ν→e±+3ν when produced in top quark decays at the Tevatron, with emphasis on the construction of transfer functions in the τ decay chain. We concluded that the τ decay chain can be successfully parametrized via a transfer function and that the method has the potential to provide an accurate charged Higgs mass measurement in this channel. Triggering on τ leptons is a key component for many beyond the Standard Model searches at ATLAS, such as the search for the charged Higgs boson. Events containing Z bosons can be used to measure the efficiency of the ATLAS τ hadronic-decay trigger. We have used a tag-and-probe method on simulated Z boson decays to 2 τ leptons where one decays to a μ while the other decays hadronically. The μ is used as the tag and the τ side is probed. We demonstrated that the efficiency of the τ hadronic-decay trigger can be accurately measured with this method using the first 100 pb-1 of ATLAS data. / Felaktigt tryckt som Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science and Technology 732

This thesis is concerned with experimental investigations of properties of the top quark and processes involving this particle. In the first part of the thesis, the first determination of the electric charge of the top quark is presented. The measurement was made using top quark pair events produced in proton-antiproton collisions recorded by the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. It is based on the reconstruction of the charge of the top quarks decay products from the dominant decay to a W boson and a b-quark. The method uses a jet charge algorithm, calibrated with data, to discriminate between b- and antib-quark jets. A constrained kinematic fit is also performed to resolve the ambiguities of the pairing of the top quark decay products and to extract the top quark electric charge. The result is in good agreement with the Standard Model top quark electric charge of 2e/3 and an upper limit of 0.8 at 90\% confidence level on the fraction of exotic quarks with charge 4e/3 in the data sample is obtained. The second part of the thesis concerns the estimation of the top quark pair background to searches for new physics, such as supersymmetry, with the ATLAS  experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. These searches will require a robust estimation of standard model backgrounds in order to make any claims of discovery or to exclude models of new physics. For searches with a final state signature characterized by two isolated charged leptons, multiple jets and large missing transverse energy the largest source of background is expected to be top quark pairs with leptonic decay of the two W bosons from the top quarks in the event. A data-driven method to estimate this contribution based on full kinematic reconstruction of the top quark pair events is studied using simulated proton-proton collisions. It is shown that the method is capable of estimating the top quark pair background to within 12% using data corresponding to approximately 1fb-1. The systematic uncertainty is of the order of 20% and, depending on the model, the contamination of signal events can potentially be large. / QC 20100730