Professor Chris Hays

Abstract:

A low-mass right-handed neutrino could interact with electroweak bosons via mixing, a mediator particle, or loop corrections. Using an effective field theory, we determine constraints on these interactions from W-boson measurements at hadron colliders. Due to the difference in the initial states at the Tevatron and the LHC, W-boson decays to a right-handed neutrino would artificially increase the mass measured at the Tevatron while only affecting the difference between W⁺ and W⁻ mass measurements at the LHC. Measurements from CDF and the LHC are used to infer the corresponding parameter values, which are found to be inconsistent between the two. The LHC experiments can improve sensitivity to these interactions by measuring the cosine of the helicity angle using W bosons produced with transverse momentum above ≈50 GeV.

Abstract:

Higgs boson production cross-sections via gluon–gluon fusion and vector-boson fusion in proton–proton collisions are measured in the H→WW∗→ℓνℓν$$H\rightarrow WW^*\rightarrow \ell \nu \ell \nu $$ decay channel. The Large Hadron Collider delivered proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13TeV$$13\,\text {TeV}$$ between 2015 and 2018, which were recorded by the ATLAS detector, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 140fb-1.$$140\,\text {fb}^{-1}.$$ The total cross-sections for Higgs boson production by gluon–gluon fusion and vector-boson fusion times the H→WW∗$$H\rightarrow WW^*$$ branching ratio are measured to be 12.4-1.2+1.3pb$$12.4^{+1.3}_{-1.2}\,\text {pb}$$ and 0.79-0.16+0.18pb,$$0.79^{+0.18}_{-0.16}\,\text {pb},$$ respectively, in agreement with the Standard Model predictions. Higgs boson production is further characterised through measurements of Simplified Template Cross-Sections in a total of fifteen kinematic fiducial regions. A new scheme of kinematic fiducial regions has been introduced to enhance the sensitivity to CP-violating effects in Higgs boson interactions. Both schemes are used to constrain CP-even and CP-odd dimension-six operators in the Standard Model effective field theory

Abstract:

ATLAS, a general-purpose experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), makes use of a large internationally-distributed computing infrastructure, including over 106$$10^6$$ TB of managed data on disk and tape and almost one million simultaneously running CPU cores. Upgrades for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will increase the required computing resources by a factor of 3–4 by the beginning of the 2030s, and by an order of magnitude before the conclusion of data taking at the beginning of the 2040s. These resources are spread over around 100 computing sites worldwide. Efforts are underway within the experiment to evaluate and mitigate various aspects of the environmental impact of the sites, with the additional long-term goal of making recommendations to the sites that will significantly reduce the total expected environmental impact in the HL-LHC era. These efforts take several forms: building awareness in the experiment community, adjusting aspects of the computing policy, and modifications of data center configurations, either in ways that take advantage of particular features of ATLAS workloads or in generic ways that reduce the environmental impact of the computing resources. This paper describes the ongoing investigations and approaches that have already provided useful and actionable outcomes.

Abstract:

A search for the dimuon decay of the Higgs boson is presented based on $pp$ collision data recorded by ATLAS during Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $165{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ at $\sqrt{s}=13.6\mathrm{TeV}$ . To enhance the sensitivity, the results are combined with those from Run 2. An excess of events over the background is observed with a significance of $3.4\sigma$ ( $2.5\sigma$ expected). The best-fit signal strength is $\mu =1.4\pm 0.4$ . This result provides evidence for the $H\to \mu \mu$ decay with ATLAS data and offers a direct probe of the Higgs-boson Yukawa coupling to second-generation fermions.

Abstract:

A measurement of the top-quark pole mass mtpole$$ {m}_t^{\textrm{pole}} $$ is presented in tt¯$$ t\overline{t} $$ events with an additional jet, tt¯$$ t\overline{t} $$ + 1-jet, produced in pp collisions at s=13$$ \sqrt{s}=13 $$ TeV. The data sample, recorded with the ATLAS experiment during Run 2 of the LHC, corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. Events with one electron and one muon of opposite electric charge in the final state are selected to measure the tt¯$$ t\overline{t} $$ + 1-jet differential cross-section as a function of the inverse of the invariant mass of the tt¯$$ t\overline{t} $$ + 1-jet system. Iterative Bayesian Unfolding is used to correct the data to enable comparison with fixed-order calculations at next-to-leading-order accuracy in the strong coupling. The process pp→tt¯j2→3$$ pp\to t\overline{t}j\left(2\to 3\right) $$, where top quarks are taken as stable particles, and the process pp→bb¯l+νl−ν¯j2→7$$ pp\to b\overline{b}{l}^{+}\nu {l}^{-}\overline{\nu}j\left(2\to 7\right) $$, which includes top-quark decays to the dilepton final state and off-shell effects, are considered. The top-quark mass is extracted using a χ2 fit of the unfolded normalized differential cross-section distribution. The results obtained with the 2 → 3 and 2 → 7 calculations are compatible within theoretical uncertainties, providing an important consistency check. The more precise determination is obtained for the 2 → 3 measurement: mtpole=170.7±0.3stat.±1.4syst.±0.3scale±0.2PDF⊕αS$$ {m}_t^{\textrm{pole}}=170.7\pm 0.3\left(\textrm{stat}.\right)\pm 1.4\left(\textrm{syst}.\right)\pm 0.3\left(\textrm{scale}\right)\pm 0.2\left(\textrm{PDF}\oplus {\alpha}_{\textrm{S}}\right) $$ GeV, which is in good agreement with other top-quark mass results.