This thesis introduces readers to the Standard Model, the top quark and its properties, before explaining the concept of spin correlation measurement. The first measurement of top quark spin correlations at the LHC in the lepton+jets decay channel is presented. As the heaviest elementary particle, the top quark plays an essential role in the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. In the case of top quarks being produced in pairs at hadron colliders, the Standard Model predicts their spins to be correlated. The degree of correlation depends on both the production mechanism and properties of the top quark. Any deviation from the Standard Model prediction can be an indicator for new physics phenomena. The thesis employs an advanced top quark reconstruction algorithm including dedicated identification of the up- and down-type quarks from the W boson decay.

The main pacemakers of scienti?c research are curiosity, ingenuity, and a pinch of persistence. Equipped with these characteristics a young researcher will be s- cessful in pushing scienti?c discoveries. And there is still a lot to discover and to understand. In the course of understanding the origin and structure of matter it is now known that all matter is made up of six types of quarks. Each of these carry a different mass. But neither are the particular mass values understood nor is it known why elementary particles carry mass at all. One could perhaps accept some small generic mass value for every quark, but nature has decided differently. Two quarks are extremely light, three more have a somewhat typical mass value, but one quark is extremely massive. It is the top quark, the heaviest quark and even the heaviest elementary particle that we know, carrying a mass as large as the mass of three iron nuclei. Even though there exists no explanation of why different particle types carry certain masses, the internal consistency of the currently best theory—the standard model of particle physics—yields a relation between the masses of the top quark, the so-called W boson, and the yet unobserved Higgs particle. Therefore, when one assumes validity of the model, it is even possible to take precise measurements of the top quark mass to predict the mass of the Higgs (and potentially other yet unobserved) particles.

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.

The predictions of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics have been probed with remarkable accuracy, so far. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has significantly contributed to this quest. A remarkable achievement of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC was the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the last missing piece of the SM. With the increasing amount of proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC, more precise measurements of the Higgs boson are now possible, while rare processes are accessible as well. A property of the Higgs boson that is of particular importance is its coupling to the top quark, which is expected to be the strongest in the SM due to the high mass of the top quark. Therefore, its precise measurement is a stringent test of the SM. A direct measurement of the top-quark Yukawa coupling can be assessed through the Higgs-boson production in association with a pair of top quarks (ttH). This thesis presents the measurement of the ttH process with a subsequent Higgs-boson decay to a pair of b-quarks (H -> bb), the decay mode with the largest branching ratio. The measurement is performed with data collected by the ATLAS detector, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb^-1 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. Events with one or two charged leptons from the tt decay in the final state are considered to the measurement. The main challenge of the ttH(H -> bb) channel emerges from the large SM backgrounds from the production of top-quark pairs with additional jets (tt+jets). Also the many jets coming from b-hadrons (b-jets) in the final state cause combinatorial ambiguities. Thus, the identification of such jets is decisive in order to determine the signal and reject many background processes. The ttH events are split into exclusive analysis regions, based on the number of leptons, jets, and jets tagged as b-jets, providing regions enhanced in signal, or in the main background components. Specifically in the single-lepton channel, a boosted category is defined by selecting events in which the Higgs boson and possibly also the hadronically decaying top quark are produced with high transverse momentum (pT), with their decay products being collimated in large-radius jets. The single-lepton boosted channel targets events with Higgs-boson candidate pT >= 300 GeV and is the main scope of this thesis. To identify the reconstructed objects with the underlying particles and to maximise the discrimination of the ttH signal from the overwhelming tt+jets background events in the signal-enriched regions, machine-learning algorithms are employed. The background is dominated by a tt process with an additional gluon in the final state which further splits into a pair of b-quarks (tt+bb). Besides, a large number of heavy-flavour jets in the final state is not well modelled, thus many systematic uncertainties have to be considered, decreasing the sensitivity of the measurement. All the defined analysis regions are analysed together in a combined profile likelihood fit to test for the presence of signal. The fit simultaneously determines the event yields for the signal and the most important background component, while constraining the overall background model within the assigned systematic uncertainties. Eventually, the ratio of the measured ttH cross section to the SM expectation in the inclusive cross-section measurement is found to be 0.35 +0.36,-0.34}, corresponding to an observed (expected) significance of 1.0 (2.7) standard deviations. A ttH signal strength larger than the SM prediction is excluded at 95% confidence level. The measurement uncertainty is dominated by systematic uncertainties, mainly regarding the theoretical knowledge of the tt +>= 1b background process. Finally, to further test the SM, the cross-section is measured differentially as a function of the generator-level Higgs-boson pT, taking advantage of the reconstruction of the Higgs-boson kinematics.

This thesis, which won one of the six 2015 ATLAS Thesis Awards, concerns the study of the charmonium and bottomonium bound heavy quark bound states. The first section of the thesis describes the observation of a candidate for the chi_b(3P) bottomonium states. This represented the first observation of a new particle at the LHC and its existence was subsequently confirmed by D0 and LHCb experiments. The second part of the thesis presents measurements of the prompt and non-prompt production of the chi_c1 and chi_c2 charmonium states in proton-proton collisions. These measurements are compared to several theoretical predictions and can be used to inform the development of theoretical models of quarkonium production.