Searching for a charged Higgs boson and development of a hardware track trigger with the ATLAS experiment
Abstract: This thesis describes searches for a heavy charged Higgs boson decaying into a top and bottom quark pair, and the development of a hardware track trigger with theATLAS experiment. The data for the two searches was collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) with pp collision energies of √s = 8 and 13 TeV, and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 and 13.2 fb-1 respectively. The main background for this signal is the production of tt̄ pairs with additional heavy flavor radiation. The searches with a single lepton in the final state found no evidence of a charged Higgs boson, and set 95% CLS upper limits on the production times branching ratio for masses ranging between 200-1000 GeV. The preparation of using the final state with two leptons in future searches is discussed. The design of a hardware track trigger based on pattern matching and linear track fitting was studied for the purpose of reducing the high event rates of the High-Luminosity LHC, which is expected to provide pp collisions with a luminosity about five times the nominal value, in the second half of the 2020’s. A simulation framework was developed to emulate the pattern matching and was used to test its ability to filter hits in high pile-up environments. The results of this simulation, together with simulations of the track fitting and latency, show that such a track trigger is a viable option for the ATLAS experiment in the High Luminosity-LHC era.
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