The main pacemakers of scienti?c research are curiosity, ingenuity, and a pinch of persistence. Equipped with these characteristics a young researcher will be s- cessful in pushing scienti?c discoveries. And there is still a lot to discover and to understand. In the course of understanding the origin and structure of matter it is now known that all matter is made up of six types of quarks. Each of these carry a different mass. But neither are the particular mass values understood nor is it known why elementary particles carry mass at all. One could perhaps accept some small generic mass value for every quark, but nature has decided differently. Two quarks are extremely light, three more have a somewhat typical mass value, but one quark is extremely massive. It is the top quark, the heaviest quark and even the heaviest elementary particle that we know, carrying a mass as large as the mass of three iron nuclei. Even though there exists no explanation of why different particle types carry certain masses, the internal consistency of the currently best theory—the standard model of particle physics—yields a relation between the masses of the top quark, the so-called W boson, and the yet unobserved Higgs particle. Therefore, when one assumes validity of the model, it is even possible to take precise measurements of the top quark mass to predict the mass of the Higgs (and potentially other yet unobserved) particles.
This will be a required acquisition text for academic libraries. More than ten years after its discovery, still relatively little is known about the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. This extensive survey summarizes and reviews top-quark physics based on the precision measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, as well as examining in detail the sensitivity of these experiments to new physics. Finally, the author provides an overview of top quark physics at the Large Hadron Collider.
This thesis presents the first experimental calibration of the top-quark Monte-Carlo mass. It also provides the top-quark mass-independent and most precise top-quark pair production cross-section measurement to date. The most precise measurements of the top-quark mass obtain the top-quark mass parameter (Monte-Carlo mass) used in simulations, which are partially based on heuristic models. Its interpretation in terms of mass parameters used in theoretical calculations, e.g. a running or a pole mass, has been a long-standing open problem with far-reaching implications beyond particle physics, even affecting conclusions on the stability of the vacuum state of our universe. In this thesis, this problem is solved experimentally in three steps using data obtained with the compact muon solenoid (CMS) detector. The most precise top-quark pair production cross-section measurements to date are performed. The Monte-Carlo mass is determined and a new method for extracting the top-quark mass from theoretical calculations is presented. Lastly, the top-quark production cross-sections are obtained – for the first time – without residual dependence on the top-quark mass, are interpreted using theoretical calculations to determine the top-quark running- and pole mass with unprecedented precision, and are fully consistently compared with the simultaneously obtained top-quark Monte-Carlo mass.
Before any kind of new physics discovery could be made at the LHC, a precise understanding and measurement of the Standard Model of particle physics' processes was necessary. The book provides an introduction to top quark production in the context of the Standard Model and presents two such precise measurements of the production of top quark pairs in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV that were observed with the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC. The presented measurements focus on events with one charged lepton, missing transverse energy and jets. Using novel and advanced analysis techniques as well as a good understanding of the detector, they constitute the most precise measurements of the quantity at that time.
The predictions of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics have been probed with remarkable accuracy, so far. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has significantly contributed to this quest. A remarkable achievement of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC was the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the last missing piece of the SM. With the increasing amount of proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC, more precise measurements of the Higgs boson are now possible, while rare processes are accessible as well. A property of the Higgs boson that is of particular importance is its coupling to the top quark, which is expected to be the strongest in the SM due to the high mass of the top quark. Therefore, its precise measurement is a stringent test of the SM. A direct measurement of the top-quark Yukawa coupling can be assessed through the Higgs-boson production in association with a pair of top quarks (ttH). This thesis presents the measurement of the ttH process with a subsequent Higgs-boson decay to a pair of b-quarks (H -> bb), the decay mode with the largest branching ratio. The measurement is performed with data collected by the ATLAS detector, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb^-1 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. Events with one or two charged leptons from the tt decay in the final state are considered to the measurement. The main challenge of the ttH(H -> bb) channel emerges from the large SM backgrounds from the production of top-quark pairs with additional jets (tt+jets). Also the many jets coming from b-hadrons (b-jets) in the final state cause combinatorial ambiguities. Thus, the identification of such jets is decisive in order to determine the signal and reject many background processes. The ttH events are split into exclusive analysis regions, based on the number of leptons, jets, and jets tagged as b-jets, providing regions enhanced in signal, or in the main background components. Specifically in the single-lepton channel, a boosted category is defined by selecting events in which the Higgs boson and possibly also the hadronically decaying top quark are produced with high transverse momentum (pT), with their decay products being collimated in large-radius jets. The single-lepton boosted channel targets events with Higgs-boson candidate pT >= 300 GeV and is the main scope of this thesis. To identify the reconstructed objects with the underlying particles and to maximise the discrimination of the ttH signal from the overwhelming tt+jets background events in the signal-enriched regions, machine-learning algorithms are employed. The background is dominated by a tt process with an additional gluon in the final state which further splits into a pair of b-quarks (tt+bb). Besides, a large number of heavy-flavour jets in the final state is not well modelled, thus many systematic uncertainties have to be considered, decreasing the sensitivity of the measurement. All the defined analysis regions are analysed together in a combined profile likelihood fit to test for the presence of signal. The fit simultaneously determines the event yields for the signal and the most important background component, while constraining the overall background model within the assigned systematic uncertainties. Eventually, the ratio of the measured ttH cross section to the SM expectation in the inclusive cross-section measurement is found to be 0.35 +0.36,-0.34}, corresponding to an observed (expected) significance of 1.0 (2.7) standard deviations. A ttH signal strength larger than the SM prediction is excluded at 95% confidence level. The measurement uncertainty is dominated by systematic uncertainties, mainly regarding the theoretical knowledge of the tt +>= 1b background process. Finally, to further test the SM, the cross-section is measured differentially as a function of the generator-level Higgs-boson pT, taking advantage of the reconstruction of the Higgs-boson kinematics.
In this thesis, the first measurement of the running of the top quark mass is presented. This is a fundamental quantum effect that had never been studied before. Any deviation from the expected behaviour can be interpreted as a hint of the presence of physics beyond the Standard Model. All relevant aspects of the analysis are extensively described and documented. This thesis also describes a simultaneous measurement of the inclusive top quark-antiquark production cross section and the top quark mass in the simulation. The measured cross section is also used to precisely determine the values of the top quark mass and the strong coupling constant by comparing to state-of-the-art theoretical predictions. All the theoretical and experimental aspects relevant to the results presented in this thesis are discussed in the initial chapters in a concise but complete way, which makes the material accessible to a wider audience.
This thesis addresses two different topics, both vital for implementing modern high-energy physics experiments: detector development and data analysis. Providing a concise introduction to both the standard model of particle physics and the basic principles of semiconductor tracking detectors, it presents the first measurement of the top quark pole mass from the differential cross-section of tt+J events in the dileptonic tt decay channel. The first part focuses on the development and characterization of silicon pixel detectors. To account for the expected increase in luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the pixel detector of the compact muon solenoid (CMS) experiment is replaced by an upgraded detector with new front-end electronics. It presents comprehensive test beam studies conducted to verify the design and quantify the performance of the new front-end in terms of tracking efficiency and spatial resolution. Furthermore, it proposes a new cluster interpolation method, which utilizes the third central moment of the cluster charge distribution to improve the position resolution. The second part of the thesis introduces an alternative measurement of the top quark mass from the normalized differential production cross-sections of dileptonic top quark pair events with an additional jet. The energy measurement is 8TeV. Using theoretical predictions at next-to-leading order in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the top quark pole mass is determined using a template fit method.
This thesis presents the first measurement of charmed D0 meson production relative to the reaction plane in Pb–Pb collisions at the center-of-mass energy per nucleon-nucleon collision of √sNN = 2.76 TeV. It also showcases the measurement of the D0 production in p–Pb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV with the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The measurement of the D0 azimuthal anisotropy with respect to the reaction plane indicates that low- momentum charm quarks participate in the collective expansion of the high-density, strongly interacting medium formed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, despite their large mass. This behavior can be explained by charm hadronization via recombination with light quarks from the medium and collisional energy loss. The measurement of the D0 production in p–Pb collisions is crucial to separate the effect induced by cold nuclear matter from the final- state effects induced by the hot medium formed in Pb–Pb collisions. The D0 production in p–Pb collisions is consistent with the binary collision scaling of the production in pp collisions, demonstrating that the modification of the momentum distribution observed in Pb–Pb collisions with respect to pp is predominantly induced by final-state effects such as the charm energy loss.
This thesis provides a comprehensive view of the physics of charmed hadrons in high-energy proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions. Given their large masses, charm quarks are produced in the early stage of a heavy-ion collision and they subsequently experience the full system evolution probing the colour-deconfined medium called quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in such collisions. In this thesis, the mechanisms of charm-quark in-medium energy loss and hadronisation are discussed via the measurements of the production of charm mesons with (Ds+) and without (D+) strange-quark content in different colliding systems, using data collected by the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC. The participation of the charm quark and its possible thermalisation in the QGP are studied via measurements of azimuthal anisotropies in the production of D+ mesons. Finally, the prospects for future measurements with the upgraded ALICE experimental apparatus and with more refined machine learning techniques are presented.
