Dr William Balunas

Abstract:

Abstract Non-ionizing energy loss causes bulk damage to the silicon sensors of the ATLAS pixel and strip detectors. This damage has important implications for data-taking operations, charged-particle track reconstruction, detector simulations, and physics analysis. This paper presents simulations and measurements of the leakage current in the ATLAS pixel detector and semiconductor tracker as a function of location in the detector and time, using data collected in Run 1 (2010–2012) and Run 2 (2015–2018) of the Large Hadron Collider. The extracted fluence shows a much stronger | z |-dependence in the innermost layers than is seen in simulation. Furthermore, the overall fluence on the second innermost layer is significantly higher than in simulation, with better agreement in layers at higher radii. These measurements are important for validating the simulation models and can be used in part to justify safety factors for future detector designs and interventions.

Abstract:

Abstract The production cross-section of a top quark in association with a W boson is measured using proton–proton collisions at $$\sqrt{s} = 8\,\text {TeV}$$ s=8TeV . The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of $$20.2\,\text {fb}^{-1}$$ 20.2fb-1 , and was collected in 2012 by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The analysis is performed in the single-lepton channel. Events are selected by requiring one isolated lepton (electron or muon) and at least three jets. A neural network is trained to separate the tW signal from the dominant $$t{\bar{t}}$$ tt¯ background. The cross-section is extracted from a binned profile maximum-likelihood fit to a two-dimensional discriminant built from the neural-network output and the invariant mass of the hadronically decaying W boson. The measured cross-section is $$\sigma _{tW} = 26 \pm 7\,\text {pb}$$ σtW=26±7pb , in good agreement with the Standard Model expectation.

Abstract:

We present a method for identifying H→WW∗→ℓνjj events in the presence of large Standard Model backgrounds and illustrate how this decay mode may be applied to the study of Bell-type Inequalities. Our findings reveal the feasibility of complete reconstruction of such Higgs decays and the efficacy of our suggested combination of selection criteria in effectively mitigating the otherwise overwhelming backgrounds. Our approach is based on a combination of bottom and charm tagging, alongside innovative reconstruction techniques. A realistic simulation based on publicly available object identification, reconstruction, and tagging efficiencies from the ATLAS experiment is used to explore the potential sensitivity to violations of the Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu (CGLMP) inequality in existing and expected future data collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is found that, the proposed method provides a powerful means of distinguishing the Higgs decay mode from the background, allowing us to achieve an expectation of approximately 3σ significance in detecting violations of these inequalities with 300 fb-1 of data, soon-to-be collected by the LHC

Abstract:

This article presents a new set of proton parton distribution functions, ATLASepWZVjet20, produced in an analysis at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. The new data sets considered are the measurements of W+ and W− boson and Z boson production in association with jets in pp collisions at 𝑠√ = 8 TeV performed by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC with integrated luminosities of 20.2 fb−1 and 19.9 fb−1, respectively. The analysis also considers the ATLAS measurements of differential W± and Z boson production at 𝑠√ = 7 TeV with an integrated luminosity of 4.6 fb−1 and deep-inelastic-scattering data from e±p collisions at the HERA accelerator. An improved determination of the sea-quark densities at high Bjorken x is shown, while confirming a strange-quark density similar in size to the up- and down-sea-quark densities in the range x ≲ 0.02 found by previous ATLAS analyses.

Abstract:

A bstract A search for long-lived particles, which have come to rest within the ATLAS detector, is presented. The subsequent decays of these particles can produce high-momentum jets, resulting in large out-of-time energy deposits in the ATLAS calorimeters. These de- cays are detected using data collected during periods in the LHC bunch structure when collisions are absent. The analysed dataset is composed of events from proton-proton collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider at a centre-of-mass energy of $$ \sqrt{s} $$ s = 13 TeV and recorded by the ATLAS experiment during 2017 and 2018. The dataset used for this search corresponds to a total live time of 579 hours. The results of this search are used to derive lower limits on the mass of gluino R -hadrons, assuming a branching fraction $$ \mathcal{B}\left(\overset{\sim }{g}\to q\overline{q}{\chi}_1^0\right) $$ B g ~ → q q ¯ χ 1 0 = 100%, with masses of up to 1 . 4 TeV excluded for gluino lifetimes of 10 − 5 to 10 3 s.