Modeling Radiation Damage to Pixel Sensors in the ATLAS Detector

Silicon pixel detectors are at the core of the current ATLAS detector and its planned upgrade. As the detectors in closest proximity to the interaction point, they will be exposed to a significant amount of radiation: prior to the HL-LHC, the innermost layers will receive a fluence in excess of $10^{15}$ 1 MeV $n_\mathrm{eq}/\mathrm{cm}^2$ and the HL-LHC detector upgrades must cope with an order of magnitude higher fluence integrated over their lifetimes. This talk presents a digitization model that includes radiation damage effects to the ATLAS Pixel sensors for the first time. After a thorough description of the setup, predictions for basic pixel cluster properties are presented alongside first validation studies with Run 2 collision data.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures; Talk presented at the APS Division of Particles and Fields Meeting (DPF 2017), July 31-August 4, 2017, Fermilab. C17073

Jet Charge with the ATLAS Detector using s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV pppp Collision Data

The momentum-weighted sum of the charges of tracks associated to a jet provides an experimental handle on the electric charge of fundamental strongly-interacting particles. An overview of a study of this jet charge observable for jets produced in dijet and semileptonic $t\bar{t}$ events using $5.8$ $\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ of data with the ATLAS detector at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV is described here. In addition to providing a constraint on hadronization models, jet charge has many possible applications in measurements and searches. The modelling of jet charge and its performance as a charge-tagger are studied in order to establish this observable as a tool for future physics analyses.Comment: Proceedings for a poster presented at LHCP 201

Limits on new coloured fermions using precision jet data from the Large Hadron Collider

This work presents an interpretation of high precision jet data from the ATLAS experiment in terms of exclusion limits for new coloured matter. To this end, the effect of a new coloured fermion with a mass $m_X$ on the solution of the renormalization group equation QCD is studied. Theoretical predictions for the transverse energy-energy correlation function and its asymmetry are obtained with such a modified solution and, from the comparison to data, 95\% CL exclusion limits are set on such models.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures. v3 matches the published versio

Sneaky light stop

A light supersymmetric top quark partner (stop) with a mass nearly degenerate with that of the Standard Model (SM) top quark can evade direct searches. The precise measurement of SM top properties such as the cross-section has been suggested to give a handle for this `stealth stop' scenario. We present an estimate of the potential impact a light stop may have on top quark mass measurements. The results indicate that certain light stop models may induce a bias of up to a few GeV, and that this effect can hide the shift in, and hence sensitivity from, cross-section measurements. The studies make some simplifying assumptions for the top quark measurement technique, and are based on truth-level samples