Author: Nuhirath Rafthia
Mentor: Miguel Fiolhais
Institution: BMCC / Columbia
Abstract: The objective of this research project was to study the associated production of a Z boson with a top-quark pair at the Large Hadron Collider using proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector. Differential kinematic distributions between the top quarks and the Z boson were measured in final states with two oppositely charged leptons in order to probe new physics contributions beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Detector simulation, event selection and event reconstruction procedures were implemented to perform these measurements, taking into account the dominant background contributions. High precision theoretical calculations of the associated production of a Z boson with a top-quark pair at the Large Hadron Collider were carried out, in order to study the dependence of the aforementioned observables with higher order anomalous contributions. These calculations will enable the determination of exclusion limits on beyond the Standard Model top-quark anomalous couplings.
NuhirathRafthiaPosterBARS2021-Nuhirath-Rafthia