The work presented in this thesis spans a wide range of experimental particle physics subjects, starting from level-1 trigger electronics to the final results of the search for Higgs boson decay and to tau lepton pairs. The thesis describes an innovative reconstruction algorithm for tau decays and details how it was instrumental in providing a measurement of Z decay to tau lepton pairs. The reliability of the analysis is fully established by this measurement before the Higgs boson decay to tau lepton pairs is considered. The work described here continues to serve as a model for analysing CMS Higgs to tau leptons measurements.

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 (

The standard model of particle physics is expected to be a low energy effective theory valid for particle interactions below the TeV scale. Above this scale, extensions to the standard model (SM) augment the existing particle content, leading to enhanced production of many final states at colliders. Specifically, the production and decay of massive charged or neutral particles can produce an excess of W boson pairs for neutral particles or W and Z boson pairs for charged particles. We search for resonant WW or WZ production using up to 5.4 fb−1 of integrated luminosity collected by the D0 experiment in Run II of the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. The data are consistent with the standard model background expectation, and we set limits on a resonance mass using the sequential standard model (SSM) W(prime) boson and the Randall-Sundrum model graviton G as benchmarks. We exclude an SSM W(prime) boson in the mass range 180-690 GeV and a Randall-Sundrum graviton in the range 300-754 GeV at 95% CL.