"The intriguing nature of the top quark, by far the heaviest particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, has motivated the development of many theoretical extensions predicting the existence of new massive particles decaying to a pair of top-antitop quarks. The production of these hypothetical particles in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider would reveal itself as a resonance in the expected smooth distribution of the top-antitop quark invariant mass. This thesis presents a search for such a new heavy particle decaying to a pair of top-antitop quarks in the semi-leptonic final state. The analyzed data sample amounts to a total of 4.6 fb-1 at a proton-proton collision center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. Novel techniques specifically tailored to the identification of the decay products of highly energetic top quarks are developed and used. No evidence for resonant production of pairs of top-antitop quarks is found and, as a result, constraints are set on two theoretical models. Upper limits on the production cross-section times branching ratio are established at a 95% credibility level for a leptophobic Zʹ boson from the Topcolor model, and a Kaluza-Klein gluon from the Randall-Sundrum model. The Zʹ boson and the Kaluza-Klein gluon are excluded to exist (at a 95% credibility level) in the mass ranges 0.8-1.65 TeV and 0.8-1.88 TeV, respectively. The constraints de- rived in this thesis on the two theoretical models are more stringent than the ones obtained at other experiments, thanks to the large center-of-mass energy and the dedicated high-energy top quark identification techniques used." --

This thesis presents two studies in a search for new heavy resonances with 139 fb-1 of proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at √s = 13 TeV as measured by the ATLAS detector. In many Standard Model extensions, the top quark plays an important role in the dynamics of electroweak symmetry breaking, and so the studies presented here focus on heavy resonance searches in the top-antitop decay channel and their combination with searches for heavy resonances decaying into other final states. The first study detailed in this thesis is a search for new heavy resonances in a semileptonically decaying top-antitop final state where no significant excesses of data were observed with respect to the background prediction. That being so, exclusion limits at the 95% confidence level were placed on possible resonant masses for a Z′ in a leptophobic topcolor-assisted technicolor model and for a bulk Randall-Sundrum graviton at 4.2 TeV and 1.0 TeV, respectively. This top-antitop search was combined with searches in orthogonal final states performed by the ATLAS Collaboration from which limit contours were placed at the 95% confidence level in the space of couplings to Standard Model particles for the Heavy Vector Triplet model.

Many theories beyond the Standard Model predict new massive particles that decay preferentially to top-antitop quark pairs. This thesis investigates the dilepton final state where both W bosons from the top quarks decay into leptons. This final state features the highest purity for top quarks but is kinematically under-constrained due to the presence of the two neutrinos that leave the ATLAS detector undetected. Using kinematic constraints from the top-antitop quark decay chain, along with the missing energy, leptons, and jets, that are measured with the ATLAS detector, a set of analytic solutions for the four-vectors of the neutrinos can be obtained. With this information, the invariant mass can be reconstructed up to a four-fold ambiguity. Methods used to eliminate incorrect neutrino solutions are investigated and characterized. For a resonance particle with a mass much larger than the top quark mass, the top quarks will be highly boosted, resulting in collimated decay products of the top quark. Optimizing the lepton selection in such an environment is very important and is also discussed.