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.

This doctoral thesis focuses on the search for new phenomena in top-antitop quark (tt) final states with additional b-quark jets at the LHC. It uses the full Run 1 dataset collected by the ATLAS experiment in proton-proton collisions at √s=8 TeV. The final state of interest consists of an isolated lepton, a neutrino and at least six jets with at least four b-tagged jets, a challenging experimental signature owing to the large background from tt+heavy-flavor production. This final state is characteristic of ttH production, with the Higgs boson decaying into bb, a process that allows direct probing of the top-Higgs Yukawa coupling. This signature is also present in many extensions of the Standard Model that have been proposed as solutions to the hierarchy problem, such as supersymmetry or composite Higgs models, which predict the pair production of bosonic or fermionic top quark partners, or the anomalous production of four-top-quark events. All these physics processes have been searched for using an ambitious search strategy that has been developed on the basis of a combination of state-of-art theoretical predictions and a sophisticated statistical analysis to constrain in-situ the large background uncertainties. As a result, the most restrictive bounds to date on the above physics processes have been obtained.

The work presented in this PhD dissertation is the first search at CMS for Higgs bosons produced in association with top quarks (ttH) in a final state consisting of only jets. The results presented in this book uncover a new class of ttH events that will help us elucidate our understanding of the Yukawa sector interactions between the Higgs boson and the top quark. Despite this being the most common decay signature for ttH, a large contamination of SM backgrounds makes it the most challenging for extracting a signal from data. The PhD thesis presents many sophisticated tools and techniques that were developed in order to overcome these challenges. These tools pave the way for future analyses to investigate other standard model and beyond-standard model physics.

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 thesis presents innovative contributions to the CMS experiment in the new trigger system for the restart of the LHC collisions in Run II, as well as original analysis methods and important results that led to official publications of the Collaboration. The author's novel reconstruction algorithms, deployed on the Field-Programmable Gate Arrays of the new CMS trigger architecture, have brought a gain of over a factor 2 in efficiency for the identification of tau leptons, with a very significant impact on important H boson measurements, such as its decays to tau lepton pairs and the search for H boson pair production. He also describes a novel analysis of HH → bb tautau, a high priority physics topic in a difficult channel. The original strategy, optimisation of event categories, and the control of the background have made the result one of the most sensitive concerning the self-coupling of the Higgs boson among all possible channels at the LHC.

The Hierarchy Problem is arguably the most important guiding principle concerning the extension to high-energy scales of the Standard Model (SM) of Fundamental Interactions. Every scenario for addressing this issue unavoidably predicts new physics in the TeV energy range, which is currently being probed directly by the LHC experimental program. Among the possible solutions to the Hierarchy Problem, the scenario of a composite Higgs boson is a very simple idea and a rather plausible picture has emerged over the years by combining the following ingredients: First, the Higgs must be a (pseudo-) Nambu-Goldstone boson, rather than a generic hadron of the new strong sector. Second, through the so-called ‘partial compositeness’, SM particles mix with strong sector resonances with suitable quantum numbers, so that they become a linear combination of elementary and composite degrees of freedom. Recently, general descriptions of the Composite Higgs Scenario were developed which successfully capture the relevant features of this theoretical framework in a largely model-independent way. The present book provides a concise and illustrative introduction to the subject for a broad audience of graduate students and non-specialist researchers in the fields of particle, nuclear and gravitational physics.

This book provides a self-contained description of the measurements of the magnetic dipole moments of the electron and muon, along with a discussion of the measurements of the fine structure constant, and the theory associated with magnetic and electric dipole moments. Also included are the searches for a permanent electric dipole moment of the electron, muon, neutron and atomic nuclei. The related topic of the transition moment for lepton flavor violating processes, such as neutrinoless muon or tauon decays, and the search for such processes are included as well. The papers, written by many of the leading authors in this field, cover both the experimental and theoretical aspects of these topics. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Historical Introduction to Electric and Mangnetic Moments (367 KB). Contents: Historical Introduction (B L Roberts); Electromagnetic Dipole Moments and New Physics (A Czarnecki & W J Marciano); Lepton g OCo 2 from 1947 to Present (T Kinoshita); Analytic QED Calculations of the Anomalous Magnetic Moment of the Electron (S Laporta & E Remiddi); Measurements of the Electron Magnetic Moment (G Gabrielse); Determining the Fine Structure Constant (G Gabrielse); Helium Fine Structure Theory for the Determination of (K Pachucki & J Sapirstein); Hadronic Vacuum Polarization and the Lepton Anomalous Magnetic Moments (M Davier); The Hadronic Light-by-Light Contribution to a, e (J Prades et al.); General Prescriptions for One-loop Contributions to a e, (K R Lynch); Measurement of the Muon ( g OCo 2) Value (J P Miller et al.); Muon ( g OCo 2) and Physics Beyond the Standard Model (D StAckinger); Probing CP Violation with Electric Dipole Moments (M Pospelov & A Ritz); The Electric Dipole Moment of the Electron (E D Commins & D DeMille); Neutron EDM Experiments (S K Lamoreaux & R Golub); Nuclear Electric Dipole Moments (W C Griffith et al.); EDM Measurements in Storage Rings (B L Roberts et al.); Models of Lepton Flavor Violation (Y Okada); Search for the Charged Lepton-Flavor-Violating Transition Moments l OaAE l OC (Y Kuno). Readership: Researchers and graduate students in particle physics, atomic physics and nuclear physics, as well as experts working in the field