Browsing by Subject "ATLAS"

A measurement of the Standard Model cross section for the production of a single top quark in association with a $W$-boson from proton-proton collisions is presented. Collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV totaling 139 inverse femtobarns collected by the ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Collider is used to study the process. Binary classifiers trained using kinematic properties of observable particles are used to separate the signal process from a large top pair production background. A binned maximum likelihood fit is performed to extract the Standard Model cross section for the signal process, along with a secondary top pair cross section measurement and uncertainties related to object reconstruction with the detector and theoretical models. The measured cross section is the most precise measurement performed using the ATLAS detector and is in good agreement with the Standard Model prediction.

The J/ψ particle has been the source of much research since its

discovery in 1974. It provides an important probe of quantum

chromodynamics and has lead to many important insights into the

interactions of quarks and gluons in bound states. The rate of J/ψ

production was found to be much higher than expected at hadron

colliding experiments. Non-relativistic quantum chromodynamics was

developed in order to address these issues. This theory predicts a

strong spin-alignment not observed in data. All previous measurements

of J/ψ production have overlooked the hadronic environment the

J/ψ is produced in. This work is the first exploration of the

radiation surrounding J/ψ events measured at ATLAS at

√s=8 TeV. This is the first measurement of the

separation between the J/ψ and a matched jet and the second

measurement of the momentum fraction shared between the jet and the

J/ψ. These variables probe the radiation environment around the

J/ψ, and provide a new ways to understand quarkonia production.

A search for supersymmetry in pair-produced gluinos decaying via top squarks to the lightest neutralino is presented. Events with multiple hadronic jets, of which at least three must be identified as originating from b-quarks, and large amounts of missing transverse energy in the final state, are selected for study. The dataset utilized encompasses proton-proton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 13 TeV and integrated luminosity of 79.9 fb-1 collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC from 2015 to 2017. The search employs a parameterized boosted decision tree (BDT) to separate supersymmetric signal events from standard model backgrounds. New methods for optimal BDT parameter point selection and signal region creation, as well as new soft kinematic variables, are exploited to increase the search's expected exclusion limit beyond prior analyses of the same dataset by 100-200 GeV in the gluino and neutralino mass plane. No excess is observed in data above the predicted background, extending the previous exclusion limit at the 95% confidence level by 250 GeV to approximately 1.4 TeV in neutralino mass. The analytical and machine learning techniques developed here will benefit future analysis of additional Run 2 data from 2018.