A search for single top-quark production via flavour-changing neutral current processes from gluon plus up- or charm-quark initial states in proton-proton collisions at the LHC is presented. Data collected with the ATLAS detector in 2012 at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb-1 are used. Furthermore, candidate events for a top quark decaying into a lepton, a neutrino and a jet are selected and classified into signal- and background-like candidates using a neural network.

This PhD thesis focuses on the search for flavor-changing neutral currents in the decay of a top quark to an up-type quark (q = u, c) and the Standard Model Higgs boson, where the Higgs boson decays to bb. Further, the thesis presents the combination of this search for top quark pair events with other ATLAS searches – in the course of which the most restrictive bounds to date on tqH interactions were obtained. Following on from the discovery of the Higgs boson, it is particularly important to measure the Yukawa couplings of the Standard Model fermions; these parameters may provide crucial insights to help solve the flavor puzzle and may help reveal the presence of new physics before it is directly observed in experiments.

This book reports on the search for a new heavy particle, the Vector-Like Top quark (VLT), in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The signal process is the pair production of VLT decaying into a Higgs boson and top quark (TT→Ht+X, X=Ht, Wb, Zt). The signal events result in top–antitop quarks final states with additional heavy flavour jets. The book summarises the analysis of the data collected with the ATLAS detector in 2015 and 2016. In order to better differentiate between signals and backgrounds, exclusive taggers of top quark and Higgs boson were developed and optimised for VLT signals. These efforts improved the sensitivity by roughly 30%, compared to the previous analysis. The analysis outcomes yield the strongest constraints on parameter space in various BSM theoretical models. In addition, the book addresses detector operation and the evaluation of tracking performance. These efforts are essential to properly collecting dense events and improving the accuracy of the reconstructed objects that are used for particle identification. As such, they represent a valuable contribution to data analysis in extremely dense environments.

The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle. With a coupling to the Higgs boson close to unity, the top quark plays a special role in electroweak symmetry breaking as well as in physics beyond the Standard Model. An accurate measurement of its properties can provide key information for understanding the physics at the TeV scale. In this dissertation, two measurements of the top quark properties are presented. The first part of this dissertation presents the first-ever ATLAS search for the associated production of a single top quark and a photon. This analysis is performed with 139 fb−1 of pp collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC at [square root symbol] s = 13 TeV. Only final states with exactly one lepton and at least one photon are considered in this analysis. In the second part, results from the combination of ATLAS searches for flavor changing neutral currents (FCNC) in t->Hq decays are presented. Four FCNC analyses, probing different Higgs decay modes, performed with 36.1 fb−1 of proton-proton collision data collected by the ATLAS detector in 2015-2016 are considered in the combination. They search for top-quark pair events in which one top quark decays into Wb and the other top quark decay into Hq