Search For Lepton Flavour Violating Decays Of The Higgs And Z Bosons With The Atlas Detector

The latest of the 'Lepton Photon' symposium, one of the well-established series of meetings in the high-energy physics community, was successfully organized at the South Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, from August 7-12, 2017, where physicists around the world gathered to discuss the latest advancements in the research field.This proceedings volume of the Lepton Photon 2017 collects contributions by the plenary session speakers and the posters' presenters, which cover the latest results in particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and plans for future facilities.

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is used to search for the lepton flavor violating process Z -> eμ in pp collisions using 20.3 fb^(-1) of data collected at sqrt(s)= 8 TeV. An enhancement in the eμ invariant mass spectrum is searched for at the Z boson mass. The number of Z bosons produced in the data sample is estimated using events of similar topology, Z -> ee and μμ, significantly reducing the systematic uncertainty in the measurement. There is no evidence of an enhancement at the Z boson mass, resulting in an upper limit on the branching fraction, B(Z -> eμ)

A direct search for lepton-flavour-violating H → [mu][tau] decays of the recently discovered Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC is presented. The analysis is performed in the H → [mu][tau] had channel, where [tau] had is a hadronically decaying [tau] -lepton. The search is based on the data sample of proton-proton collisions collected by the ATLAS experiment corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb-1 at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 8 TeV. No statistically significant excess of data over the predicted background is observed. As a result, the observed (expected) 95% confidence-level upper limit on the branching fraction, Br( H → [mu][tau] ), is 1.85% (1.24%).

Abstract: This Letter presents direct searches for lepton flavour violation in Higgs boson decays, and , performed with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The searches are based on a data sample of proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of . No significant excess is observed above the expected background from Standard Model processes. The observed (median expected) 95% confidence-level upper limits on the lepton-flavour-violating branching ratios are 0.47% () and 0.28% () for and , respectively

Abstract: This thesis presents a direct search for lepton-flavour violating (LFV) decays of the Higgs boson using data from proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and recorded by the ATLAS detector at CERN. The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 138.4 1/fb collected during Run 2 of the LHC which lasted from 2015 to 2018. The search in this thesis is focused on the decays H -> e tau and H -> mu tau. Only leptonic decays of the tau-lepton leading to different-flavour final states are considered in order to suppress background contributions from Drell-Yan production. Two signal regions (VBF SR and nonVBF SR) are defined, targeting different production processes of the Higgs boson thereby allowing for exploiting the characteristic topology of the vector-boson-fusion (VBF) production. Individual neural networks are trained in each of the two signal regions aiming at classifying each collision event to be signal or background. This is achieved by assigning a probability value to each event quantifying how signal-like it is. The resulting probability distribution is used as final discriminant in the statistical analysis. For background estimation, the so-called "Symmetry Method" is used which exploits the fact that Standard-Model processes are symmetric with respect to an exchange of electrons with muons and vice versa at the high energies prevalent at the LHC. The two LFV decays H -> e tau and H -> mu tau, on the contrary, break this symmetry as long as their branching ratios (BR) are of different size since systematic differences of the kinematic properties of the electron and muon are implied within each decay. The differing branching ratios are motivated by a bound on the product of the two LFV couplings derived from mu -> e gamma. The usage of the "Symmetry Method" allows for an estimation of the background mainly based on data and hence reduces the dependence on simulated events. However, it also implies that the analysis is only sensitive to the difference in branching ratios of H -> e tau and H -> mu tau and does not allow for measuring their absolute values. The difference in branching ratios, Delta = BR(H -> mu tau) - BR(H -> e tau), is measured to be (0.25+/-0.10)% which indicates that the data favours a larger branching ratio for the decay H -> mu tau than for the decay H -> e tau with a significance of 2.5 sigma. An upper limit at 95% confidence level of 0.42% is set on the difference Delta, the expected limit is (0.19+0.08/-0.05)%. Combinations with partner analyses which use templates from simulations for background estimation are performed, assuming the respective other LFV signal to be zero. Observed (expected) upper limits at 95% confidence level on the branching ratios of the decays H -> e tau and H -> mu tau are derived to be 0.23% ((0.12+0.05/-0.03)%) and 0.17% ((0.09+0.04/-0.03)%), respectively

We use the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider to search for the lepton flavor violating process Z→e[mu] in pp collisions using 20.3 fb-1 of data collected at √s=8 TeV. An enhancement in the e[mu] invariant mass spectrum is searched for at the Z-boson mass. The number of Z bosons produced in the data sample is estimated using events of similar topology, Z→ee and [mu][mu], significantly reducing the systematic uncertainty in the measurement. In conclusion, there is no evidence of an enhancement at the Z-boson mass, resulting in an upper limit on the branching fraction, B(Z→e[mu])

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