Subject Area

Physics

Abstract

A search in the high momentum regime for new resonances, produced in association with a jet, decaying into a pair of bottom quarks is presented using an integrated luminosity of 80.5 fb-1 of proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energy √s = 13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The search was performed for low mass resonances, including the Standard Model Higgs boson and leptophobic Z' dark matter mediators, in the mass range of 100 GeV to 200 GeV. For the Standard Model Higgs boson, the observed signal strength is μH = 5.8 ± 3.1 (stat.) ± 1.9 (syst.) ± 1.7 (th.), which is consistent with the background-only hypothesis at 1.6 standard deviations. No evidence of a significant excess of events beyond the expected background is found and competitive limits on leptophobic Z' boson axial-vector couplings to Standard Model quarks with democratic couplings to all quark generations are set for the mass range considered. The dominant background in this analysis is irreducible multijet events from QCD interactions, which I modeled using a parametric function that was robust to fitting bias and spurious signals.

Degree Date

Summer 8-6-2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Physics

Advisor

Stephen Sekula

Number of Pages

189

Format

.pdf

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Share

COinS