The project reported here was a search for new super symmetric particles in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. It has produced some of the world’s best exclusion limits on such new particles. Furthermore, dedicated simulation studies and data analyses have also yielded essential input to the upgrade activities of the CMS collaboration, both for the Phase-1 pixel detector upgrade and for the R&D studies in pursuit of a Phase-2 end cap calorimeter upgrade.

This thesis represents one of the most comprehensive and in-depth studies of the use of Lorentz-boosted hadronic final state systems in the search for signals of Supersymmetry conducted to date at the Large Hadron Collider. A thorough assessment is performed of the observables that provide enhanced sensitivity to new physics signals otherwise hidden under an enormous background of top quark pairs produced by Standard Model processes. This is complemented by an ingenious analysis optimization procedure that allowed for extending the reach of this analysis by hundreds of GeV in mass of these hypothetical new particles. Lastly, the combination of both deep, thoughtful physics analysis with the development of high-speed electronics for identifying and selecting these same objects is not only unique, but also revolutionary. The Global Feature Extraction system that the author played a critical role in bringing to fruition represents the first dedicated hardware device for selecting these Lorentz-boosted hadronic systems in real-time using state-of-the-art processing chips and embedded systems.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operates at the highest energy scales ever artificially created in particle collision experiments with a center-of-mass energy √s = 13 TeV. In addition, the high luminosity allows the unique opportunity to probe the Standard Model at the electroweak scale and explore for rare signs of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The coupling of the third-generation top quark to the Higgs boson introduces large, quadratic, radiative corrections to the Higgs mass, requiring a significant amount of fine-tuning that results in a nearly perfect correction of the Higgs mass from the Planck scale to the observable electroweak scale. A possible solution to the naturalness problem proposes a collection of supersymmetric partners to the Standard Model particles with the mass of lightest particles at the electroweak scale: the gluino, the stop squarks, and the lightest supersymmetric particle. This thesis presents the results of a search for gluino pair production decaying via stop squarks to the lightest neutralino in hadronic final states using a total integrated luminosity 36.1 fb‒1 of data collected with the ATLAS detector in 2015 and 2016. This analysis considers a simplified supersymmetry model targeting extreme regions of the phase space with large missing transverse momentum, multiple b-tagged jets, and several energetic jets. No excess is observed and limits on the gluino mass are set at the 95% CL, greatly extending the previous results in 2012 from 1.4 TeV to 1.9 TeV. The increase of the LHC luminosity also poses challenges to the current trigger system in the ATLAS detector necessitating planned upgrades. One of the upgrades for the trigger system is the Global Feature Extractor (gFEX) which aims to recover lost efficiency in boosted hadronic final states by identifying large radius jets produced by top quarks, Higgs, Z and W bosons which are critical for future ATLAS physics programs. This module is a unique board with 3 processor FPGAs for data processing and an embedded multi-processor system-on-chip for slow-control and monitoring. This thesis will also describe the work on developing this hardware and several physics upgrade studies on the trigger performance.

After an extensive overview of the Standard Model and of the theory and phenomenology of Supersymmetry, this book describes the recent development of the ATLAS Particle Flow algorithm, a hadronic reconstruction technique aiming at enhancing the sensitivity of the experiment to new physics through the combination of the information from different ATLAS sub-detectors. The first ever ATLAS strong SUSY search exploiting this technique is also described, reporting the results and exclusion limits obtained using the complete proton-proton collision dataset recorded by the ATLAS experiment during the second Run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

This book is the proceedings of the International School of Subnuclear Physics, ISSP 2012, 50th Course — ERICE, 23 June 2013 - 2 July 2012. This course was devoted to the celebrations of the 50th Anniversary of the Subnuclear Physics School which was started in 1961 by Antonino Zichichi with John Bell at CERN and formally established in 1962 by Bell, Blackett, Weisskopf, Rabi and Zichichi in Geneva (CERN). The lectures covered the latest and most significant achievements in theoretical and in experimental subnuclear physics.

This book introduces the reader to the field of jet substructure, starting from the basic considerations for capturing decays of boosted particles in individual jets, to explaining state-of-the-art techniques. Jet substructure methods have become ubiquitous in data analyses at the LHC, with diverse applications stemming from the abundance of jets in proton-proton collisions, the presence of pileup and multiple interactions, and the need to reconstruct and identify decays of highly-Lorentz boosted particles. The last decade has seen a vast increase in our knowledge of all aspects of the field, with a proliferation of new jet substructure algorithms, calculations and measurements which are presented in this book. Recent developments and algorithms are described and put into the larger experimental context. Their usefulness and application are shown in many demonstrative examples and the phenomenological and experimental effects influencing their performance are discussed. A comprehensive overview is given of measurements and searches for new phenomena performed by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations. This book shows the impressive versatility of jet substructure methods at the LHC.

This Ph.D. thesis is a search for physics beyond the standard model (SM) of particle physics, which successfully describes the interactions and properties of all known elementary particles. However, no particle exists in the SM that can account for the dark matter, which makes up about one quarter of the energy-mass content of the universe. Understanding the nature of dark matter is one goal of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The extension of the SM with supersymmetry (SUSY) is considered a promising possibilities to explain dark matter. The nominated thesis describes a search for SUSY using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. It utilizes a final state consisting of a photon, a lepton, and a large momentum imbalance probing a class of SUSY models that has not yet been studied extensively. The thesis stands out not only due to its content that is explained with clarity but also because the author performed more or less all aspects of the thesis analysis by himself, from data skimming to limit calculations, which is extremely rare, especially nowadays in the large LHC collaborations.