Measurement Of The Jet Mass In Highly Boosted T Tbar Events From Pp Collisions At Sqrts

Measurement of the Jet Mass in Highly Boosted T-tbar Events from Pp Collisions at $\sqrt{s}$

The first measurement of the jet mass m[jet] of top quark jets produced in t t-bar events from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV is reported for the jet with the largest transverse momentum pt in highly boosted hadronic top quark decays. The data sample, collected with the CMS detector, corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 inverse femtobarns. The measurement is performed in the lepton+jets channel in which the products of the semileptonic decay t to bW with W to l nu where l is an electron or muon, are used to select t t-bar events with large Lorentz boosts. The products of the fully hadronic decay t to bW with W to q q'-bar are reconstructed using a single Cambridge-Aachen jet with distance parameter R=1.2, and pt>400 GeV. The t t-bar cross section as a function of m[jet] is unfolded at the particle level and is used to test the modelling of highly boosted top quark production. The peak position of the m[jet] distribution is sensitive to the top quark mass m[t], and the data are used to extract a value of m[t] to assess this sensitivity.

QCD Radiation in Top-Antitop and Z+Jets Final States

This thesis contains new research in both experimental and theoretical particle physics, making important contributions in each. Two analyses of collision data from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC are presented, as well as two phenomenological studies of heavy coloured resonances that could be produced at the LHC. The first data analysis was the measurement of top quark-antiquark production with a veto on additional jet activity. As the first detector-corrected measurement of jet activity in top-antitop events it played an important role in constraining the theoretical modelling, and ultimately reduced these uncertainties for ATLAS's other top-quark measurements by a factor of two. The second data analysis was the measurement of Z+2jet production and the observation of the electroweak vector boson fusion (VBF) component. As the first observation of VBF at a hadron collider, this measurement demonstrated new techniques to reliably extract VBF processes and paved the way for future VBF Higgs measurements. The first phenomenological study developed a new technique for identifying the colour of heavy resonances produced in proton-proton collisions. As a by-product of this study an unexpected and previously unnoticed correlation was discovered between the probability of correctly identifying a high-energy top and the colour structure of the event it was produced in. The second phenomenological study explored this relationship in more detail, and could have important consequences for the identification of new particles that decay to top quarks.

Measurement of the Jet Mass in Highly Boosted Tt ̄ Events from Pp Collisions at √s