Mountains of Physics

ATLAS Presents Latest Results at the Rencontres de Moriond in La Thuile.

5 March 2012 | By

ATLAS Collaboration

Event display of a candidate diboson event, in which two Z bosons each decayed to muon pairs.

The ATLAS Experiment is searching for an extremely broad variety of signs of new as-yet undiscovered physics. Many theories have been discussed in physics journals, and ATLAS has tremendous capabilities to investigate the signatures predicted by these theories. This plot gives an overview of a representative selection of the available results. Since there have been no discoveries with these early data, most results are summarized by saying that ATLAS has excluded a mass range below some value. In this plot, each bar shows the region that has been excluded at the 95% confidence level. The data were shown at the Rencontres de Moriond meeting in March 2012 in La Thuile. Some of the abbreviations used are: ED = extra dimensions and UED = universal extra dimension BH = black holes and QBH = quantum black holes LQ = leptoquarks ADD, RS, and DY are refer to authors' initials. SS = same sign SSM = sequential Standard Model LRSM = left-right symmetric model BR = branching ratio

Experimentalists and theorists are gathering once more in the Alps at La Thuile, Italy, March 3-17 for the annual "Rencontres de Moriond" to discuss latest results in particle physics and cosmology. ATLAS physicists will be presenting an extensive variety of measurements and of searches for new physics based on the complete set of data from 2011.

The careful analysis of 5 inverse femtobarns of data (around 350 trillion proton collisions) represents a significant accomplishment for ATLAS, and opens new windows for discovery. Results to be presented at the conference include searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, such as Z prime, excited leptons, and charged Higgs bosons.

For the ATLAS Standard Model Higgs search, sensitivity has been enhanced by the inclusion of results from the analysis of all 2011 data for the contributing decay channels. Those results are complemented by precision measurements of diboson production in the WW and ZZ channels -- studies that probe the limits of the Standard Model and improve our understanding of the underlying background in the Higgs search.

Topics for the first week of the conference, March 3-10, focus on Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories, while topics for the second week, March 11-17, put an emphasis on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), High Energy Interactions, and Cosmology.

ATLAS physicists will be presenting results pertaining to a variety of topics, including Standard Model processes, Top Quark physics, QCD, Higgs searches, Heavy Flavours, beyond the Standard Model (BSM) searches, such as Supersymmetry, and Heavy Ion collision measurements.