A Search for new Heavy Gauge Bosons Decaying to a Lepton Plus Missing Transverse Energy Using pp Collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV in the ATLAS Detector

Speaker: Brian Alex Long

When: February 12, 2013 (Tue), 02:00PM to 03:00PM (add to my calendar)
Location: PRB 261

This event is part of the Preliminary Oral Exam.

Examining Committee: John Butler, Kevin Black, Tulika Bose, Kenneth Lane, Pankaj Mehta

Abstract:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) allows one to create states of matter that may have only existed for a few moments after the big bang. The direct observation of these previously unseen phenomena would bring us one step closer toward understanding the universe. One kind of particle that could in principle be observed at the LHC is a more massive cousin of the Standard Model (SM) charged electroweak gauge boson, the W. There are many models of beyond the Standard Model physics that predict this kind of particle. The simplest version predicts a particle called the W' which possesses the same couplings as that of the SM W. The ATLAS detector is designed to be able distinguish even rare occurrences of such a particle, given some final state, within the enormous number of proton-proton collisions produced at the LHC. In my talk, I will discuss the current status of the search within ATLAS for a W' after it decays into a charged lepton and a corresponding neutrino using the full 2012 dataset of sqrt(s) = 8 TeV pp collisions at the LHC.