A first measurement of Electroweak W + 2 jets production at high dijet mass is performed using sqrt(s) = 7 TeV pp collision data from the Atlas experiment corresponding to 4.6 fb−1 of integrated luminosity. The background only hypothesis is excluded with a significance of 4.89-σ. A cross section of σ = 325 ± 6 (lumi) ±32 (stat) +63−70(syst) ±86 (theo) fb is extracted in the fiducial region.

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In this thesis I propose an improved theory of ontological commitment, one which is neutral on epistemology. Although Quine's quantificational criterion of ontological commitment has many advantages over its competitors, like its univocal treatment of being and existence, its clear account of ontological reduction and its capacity to accommodate implicit commitments, I argue that it has a fatal flaw: the inability to account for ontological commitment to individuals. Quine's choice of a first-order language of regimentation without constants is so entwined with his holist epistemology that imputations of existence cannot be made except to objects-qua-F, qua some wholly third-personal description. Commitments of those who believe that minds reach out directly to objects by means of acquaintance or introspection, encoded in language by constants, are ungrammatical in Quine's language. This breakdown of grammaticality, on my view, is an avoidable result of Quine's behaviourism and holist epistemology filtering into his choice of canonical language. I opt for a broader conception of ontological commitments as incurred by formalised theories with one or more semantic categories of categorematic objectual expressions, whose function is to stand for objects. I expand the language of regimentation at least to first-order logic with constants and identity. This preserves the attractive features of Quine's position. It retains its elegant treatment of reduction and implicit ontological commitments, and its capacity to explain away Meinongian confusions, without being beholden to global holism. My canonical language makes room for acquaintance and first-personal methods as sources of ontological commitment. It has the advantage of allowing theories like Quine's, which confine themselves to objects-qua-F, to be regimented as well as non-holist theories whose criteria of ontological commitment are 'to be is to be the referent of a name' or 'to be is to be the value of a constant or variable'.

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The first measurement of the production cross section for a single top quark in association with a W boson with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. The analysed data is from proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.9 fb-1. The analysis focuses on the leptonic final states of the process and implements a cut-based method. The final state consists of two leptons, two neutrinos and a jet from the fragmentation of a b-quark. The primary source of background events arises from tt(overbar) production, followed by Z/gamma* processes. The observed signal has a significance of 3:5sigma and corresponds to a cross section measurement of 14:9+5:0 -5:1 (stat + syst) pb, in agreement with the Standard Model expectations.

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