Measurement Of The Dijet Angular Distributions And Search For Quark Compositeness With The Cms Experiment

Measurement of the Dijet Angular Distributions and Search for Quark Compositeness with the CMS Experiment

Searches for Dijet Resonances

This book addresses one of the most intriguing mysteries of our universe: the nature of dark matter. The results presented here mark a significant and substantial contribution to the search for new physics, in particular for new particles that couple to dark matter. The first analysis presented is a search for heavy new particles that decay into pairs of hadronic jets (dijets). This pioneering analysis explores unprecedented dijet invariant masses, reaching nearly 7 TeV, and sets constraints on several important new physics models. The two subsequent analyses focus on the difficult low dijet mass region, down to 200 GeV, and employ a novel technique to efficiently gather low-mass dijet events. The results of these analyses transcend the long-standing constraints on dark matter mediator particles set by several existing experiments.

Search for New Phenomena in Dijet Angular Distributions at √s = 8 and 13 TeV

This thesis describes the use of the angular distributions of the most energetic dijets in data recorded by the ATLAS experiment, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the goal of which is to search for phenomena beyond what the current theory of Particle Physics (the Standard Model) can describe. It also describes the deployment of the method used in ATLAS to correct for the distortions in jet energy measurements caused by additional proton–proton interactions. The thesis provides a detailed introduction to understanding jets and dijet searches at the LHC. The experiments were carried out at two record collider centre-of-mass energies (8 and 13 TeV), probing smaller distances than ever before. Across a broad momentum transfer range, the proton constituents (quarks and gluons) display the same kinematical behaviour, and thus still appear to be point-like. Data are compared to predictions corrected for next-to-leading order quantum chromodynamics (NLO QCD) as well as electroweak effects, demonstrating excellent agreement. The results are subsequently used to set limits on parameters of suggested theoretical extensions to the Standard Model (SM), including the effective coupling and mass of a Dark Matter mediator.