Suarez, Indara (2015-01). Search for New Heavy Resonances Decaying To t+t^- Pairs at the LHC with Square Root S= 7 TEV (L = 5.0 FB^-1). Doctoral Dissertation.
Thesis
The Standard Model (SM) describes the known fundamental particles and their interactions due to the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces through vector boson exchange. Although the SM has had major success in predicting a wealth of experimental measurements, astrophysical evidence for dark matter the observation of neutrino oscillations, and the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe indicate that the SM is not a complete theory. In addition to these experimental observations, problems stemming from the failure to incorporate the gravitational force and the quantum instability of the mass of the Higgs Boson have also contributed to the motivation to search for physics beyond the SM. Multiple theoretical scenarios, including those inspired by Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), models with extra spatial dimensions, and Supersymmetry (SUSY), have been proposed to address the shortcomings of the SM. In many of these models, the new symmetries that extend the SM gauge structure require the existence of new heavy neutral gauge bosons. Regardless of the exact nature or production mechanism of the hypothesized heavy bosons, they may be observed by studying dilepton final states at high energy colliders. As many models of physics beyond the SM predict enhanced couplings to third generation particles, searches for the new heavy bosons decaying into two ? -leptons are particularly well motivated. We present a direct search for high mass neutral resonances decaying into two opposite sign ?-leptons using data from proton-proton collisions at the LHC with center-of-mass energy square root of s = 7 TeV. The search has been conducted using data recorded by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.94 fb-1 and includes final states with leptonic and hadronic decays of the ?-lepton. The data has been found to be consistent with the background-only hypothesis within the sensitivity of the measurement. Using the Sequential Standard Model Z'-boson as a benchmark, we set a 95% confidence-level upper limit on the mass of Z'-bosons decaying to pairs of ?-leptons.
