Electroweak physics and evidence for a Higgs boson decaying to a pair of tau leptons with the CMS detector

.Studies of the electroweak interactions using final states with leptons in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at [square root of] s = 7 TeV, [square root of] s = 8 TeV, and [square root of] s = 13 TeV center-of-mass energies are described. Measurements of total inclusive and fiducial W and Z boson production cross sections and their ratios are performed. The W and Z bosons are observed via their decays to electrons and muons. An indirect determination of the total width of the W boson and the B(W --> lv) from the measured cross section ratios is described. The discovery of a new boson with a mass of 125 GeV at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 sheds a new light on understanding the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. A question of great significance is whether the new field couples to fermions through a Yukawa coupling interaction predicted in the standard model of particles. Evidence of the 125 GeV Higgs boson decay to a pair of tau leptons with an observed significance of 3.1 standard deviations is established. The nature of the Higgs sector is probed through searches for neutral resonances decaying to a pair of tau leptons in gluon-fusion and b-quark associated production modes with no observation of a significant excess. In addition, the feasibility of measuring the standard model Higgs boson self-coupling with an expected data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3000 fb-1 is studied.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Apyan, Aram

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Markus Klute.

• Physics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112081

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/112081