Dr William Balunas

Abstract:

Abstract Leptons with essentially the same properties apart from their mass are grouped into three families (or flavours). The number of leptons of each flavour is conserved in interactions, but this is not imposed by fundamental principles. Since the formulation of the standard model of particle physics, the observation of flavour oscillations among neutrinos has shown that lepton flavour is not conserved in neutrino weak interactions. So far, there has been no experimental evidence that this also occurs in interactions between charged leptons. Such an observation would be a sign of undiscovered particles or a yet unknown type of interaction. Here the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN reports a constraint on lepton-flavour-violating effects in weak interactions, searching for Z -boson decays into a τ lepton and another lepton of different flavour with opposite electric charge. The branching fractions for these decays are measured to be less than 8.1 × 10 −6 ( e τ ) and 9.5 × 10 −6 ( μ τ ) at the 95% confidence level using 139 fb −1 of proton–proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of $$\sqrt{s}=13\,{\rm{TeV}}$$ s = 13 TeV and 20.3 fb −1 at $$\sqrt{s}=8\,{\rm{TeV}}.$$ s = 8 TeV . These results supersede the limits from the Large Electron–Positron Collider experiments conducted more than two decades ago.

Abstract:

A bstract A search for charged Higgs bosons decaying into a top quark and a bottom quark is presented. The data analysed correspond to 139 fb − 1 of proton-proton collisions at $$ \sqrt{s} $$ s = 13 TeV, recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The production of a heavy charged Higgs boson in association with a top quark and a bottom quark, pp → tbH + → tbtb , is explored in the H + mass range from 200 to 2000 GeV using final states with jets and one electron or muon. Events are categorised according to the multiplicity of jets and b -tagged jets, and multivariate analysis techniques are used to discriminate between signal and background events. No significant excess above the background-only hypothesis is observed and exclusion limits are derived for the production cross-section times branching ratio of a charged Higgs boson as a function of its mass; they range from 3.6 pb at 200 GeV to 0.036 pb at 2000 GeV at 95% confidence level. The results are interpreted in the hMSSM and $$ {M}_h^{125} $$ M h 125 scenarios.

Abstract:

Experimental tests of the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) find excellent agreement with its predictions. Since the original formation of the SM, experiments have provided little guidance regarding the explanations of phenomena outside the SM, such as the baryon asymmetry and dark matter. Nor have we understood the aesthetic and theoretical problems of the SM, despite years of searching for physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) at particle colliders. Some BSM particles can be produced at colliders yet evade being discovered, if the reconstruction and analysis procedures not matched to characteristics of the particle. An example is particles with large lifetimes. As interest in searches for such long-lived particles (LLPs) grows rapidly, a review of the topic is presented in this article. The broad range of theoretical motivations for LLPs and the experimental strategies and methods employed to search for them are described. Results from decades of LLP searches are reviewed, as are opportunities for the next generation of searches at both existing and future experiments.Comment: 79 pages, 36 figures, submitted to Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physic