Hunting the charged Higgs boson with lepton signatures in the ATLAS experiment
by
Alexander Madsen(Uppsala University)
→
Europe/Stockholm
12167 (Angström)
12167
Angström
Description
Electrically charged Higgs bosons are predicted by many Beyond-the-Standard Model theories. Charged Higgs bosons could be produced together with top quarks in proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). One of the dominant decay modes of the charged Higgs bosons would be into a tau lepton and a neutrino. In this seminar, I will present several searches for charged Higgs bosons decaying into a tau lepton and a neutrino, using data collected by the ATLAS experiment during Run 1 (2010-2012) of the LHC. Event signatures with an electron or a muon as well as a leptonically or hadronically decaying tau are analyzed and the presence of charged Higgs bosons is tested using transverse mass observables. A significant background arises from quark- and gluon-initiated jets that are misidentified as hadronic tau decays and methods used to estimate this background directly from the data itself will be discussed. Both light and heavy charged Higgs bosons (below or above the mass of the top quark, respectively) are considered, and model independent results in the form of uper limits on cross sections and branching fractions as well as their interpretation as constraints on the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model will be presented.
