Licentiate Thesis: Search for Charginos and Sleptons in ATLAS and Identification of Pile-up with the Tile Calorimeter

by Mr Pawel Klimek (Stockholm University)

Thursday 13 Feb 2014, 13:00 → 15:00 Europe/Stockholm

FB42

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world in terms of collision energy and luminosity. This thesis presents a search for supersymmetric particles in proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment. A search for direct production of chargino and slepton pairs in a final state characterised by the presence of two leptons and missing transverse momentum is presented. This analysis is done using L = 20 fb-1 proton-proton collisions at √s = 8 TeV collected in 2012. No significant excess over background is observed. Exclusion limits at 95% confidence level on chargino, neutralino and slepton production are set. In 2011-12 the LHC was providing collisions every 50 ns. This puts very strong requirements on the energy measurement in presence of energy deposits from different collisions in the same read-out window and in the same calorimeter channel (pile-up). A quality factor computed offline for each collision and for each channel in the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is studied. It is shown that the quality factor can be used to select channels that need a special treatment to account for large energy deposition from pile-up. Efficient criteria to detect pile-up in TileCal channels are proposed.