Dr. Karolos Potamianos

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.

Abstract:

We perform a search for new physics using final states consisting of three leptons and a large imbalance in transverse momentum resulting from proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV center-of-mass energy. We use data corresponding to 5.8 fb-1 of integrated luminosity recorded by the CDF II detector at the Tevatron collider. Our main objective is to investigate possible new low-momentum (down to 5 GeV/c) multi-leptonic final states not investigated by LHC experiments. Relative to previous CDF analyses, we expand the geometric and kinematic coverage of electrons and muons and utilize tau leptons that decay hadronically. Inclusion of tau leptons is particularly important for supersymmetry (SUSY) searches. The results are consistent with standard-model predictions. By optimizing our event selection to increase sensitivity to the minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) SUSY model, we set limits on the associated production of chargino and neutralino, the SUSY partners of the electroweak gauge bosons. We exclude cross sections up to 0.1 pb and chargino masses up to 168 GeV/c^2 at 95% CL, for a suited set of mSUGRA parameters. We also exclude a region of the two-dimensional space of the masses of the neutralino and the supersymmetric partner of the tau lepton, not previously excluded at the Tevatron.

Abstract:

Using the full CDF Run II data sample, we report evidence for a new resonance, which we refer to as $B(5970)$, found simultaneously in the $B^0π^+$ and $B^+π^-$ mass distributions with a significance of 4.4 standard deviations. We further report the first study of resonances consistent with orbitally excited $B^{+}$ mesons and an updated measurement of the properties of orbitally excited $B^0$ and $B_s^0$ mesons. We measure the masses and widths of all states, as well as the relative production rates of $B_1$, $B_2^*$, and $B(5970)$ states and the branching fraction of the $B_{s2}^{*0}$ state to either $B^{*+} K^-$ and $B^{+} K^-$. Furthermore, we measure the production rates of the orbitally excited $B^{0,+}$ states relative to the $B^{0,+}$ ground state. The masses of the new $B(5970)$ resonances are $5978\pm5(\textrm{stat})\pm12(\textrm{syst}) \textrm{ MeV/c}^{2}$ for the neutral state and $5961\pm5(\textrm{stat})\pm12(\textrm{syst}) \textrm{ MeV/c}^{2}$ for the charged state, assuming that the resonance decays into $Bπ$ final states. The properties of the orbitally excited and the new $B(5970)^{0,+}$ states are compatible with isospin symmetry.