Professor Chris Hays

Abstract:

© 2013 CERN. This Letter reports a measurement of the high-mass Drell-Yan differential cross-section in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV at the LHC. Based on an integrated luminosity of 4.9fb -1 , the differential cross-section in the Z/γ * →e + e - channel is measured with the ATLAS detector as a function of the invariant mass, m ee , in the range 116 < m ee < 1500GeV, for a fiducial region in which both the electron and the positron have transverse momentum p T > 25GeV and pseudorapidity |η| < 2.5. A comparison is made to various event generators and to the predictions of perturbative QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order.

Abstract:

A search is presented for microscopic black holes in a like-sign dimuon final state in proton-proton collisions at √s=8 TeV. The data were collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb-1. Using a high track multiplicity requirement, 0.6±0.2 background events from Standard Model processes are predicted and none observed. This result is interpreted in the context of low-scale gravity models and 95% C.L. lower limits on microscopic black hole masses are set for different model assumptions. © 2013 CERN. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Abstract:

We present a measurement of the production cross section for ZW and ZZ boson pairs in final states with a pair of charged leptons, from the decay of a Z boson, and at least two jets, from the decay of a W or Z boson, using the full sample of proton-antiproton collisions recorded with the CDF II detector at the Tevatron, corresponding to 8.9 fb^(-1) of integrated luminosity. We increase the sensitivity to vector boson decays into pairs of quarks using a neural network discriminant that exploits the differences between the spatial spread of energy depositions and charged-particle momenta contained within the jet of particles originating from quarks and gluons. Additionally, we employ new jet energy corrections to Monte Carlo simulations that account for differences in the observed energy scales for quark and gluon jets. The number of signal events is extracted through a simultaneous fit to the dijet mass spectrum in three classes of events: events likely to contain jets with a heavy-quark decay, events likely to contain jets originating from light quarks, and events that fail these identification criteria. We determine the production cross section to be 2.5 +2.0 -1.0 pb (< 6.1 pb at the 95% confidence level), consistent with the standard model prediction of 5.1 pb.