New heavy gauge boson searches at ATLAS and their phenomenological interpretation

Student: Ricardo Gonzalez Lopez
Supervisor: Uta Klein

Many extensions of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics predict new charged and neutral heavy gauge bosons which, in analogy to SM vector bosons, are usually referred to as W' and Z' bosons. The presence of these particles would be detected as an excess in the number of measured events in the lepton plus missing energy and dilepton mass distributions respectively.

This project will consist of a search for new heavy gauge bosons using the full 2015-2018 Run 2 dataset collected in the ATLAS experiment at LHC. The large Run 2 statistics of 140 fb-1 allows to develop more sophisticated searches investigating in detail differential kinematic distributions. Novel search methods will be developed that are guided by state-of-the art phenomenological models using machine learning techniques to improve the sensitivity of a potential signal over the background processes. This could lead tosignificant improvements of the current ways to carry out the searches and eventually lead to high impact discoveries.