# Search for charged Higgs bosons in tau-lepton final states with 139 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data recorded at a centre of mass energy of 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Author:
Date created:
2019-11-20
Identifier:
etd20654
Keywords:
CERN
ATLAS
Standard Model
Charged Higgs Boson
Abstract:

The Higgs boson, with a measured mass of approximately $125~GeV$, has been studied extensively since its discovery in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. This discovery opens the question of whether the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (SM) is the only scalar particle of Nature or it belongs to a larger scalar sector, as predicted in many Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) theories. Therefore, observation of charged Higgs bosons would indicate new physics. This thesis presents results of a search for a charged Higgs boson in the mass range $80~GeV$ to $3~TeV$, through tau-lepton final states. The search is performed using proton-proton collisions data at $\sqrt{s}=13~\mbox{TeV}$, collected with the ATLAS experiment, during 2015 to 2018. The final results are interpreted in the context of the Minimal SuperSymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) benchmark scenarios. In these scenarios, charged Higgs bosons coupling to tau-lepton are enhanced for some parts of the search phase space, thus increasing the chance of their discovery. No significant excess of events above the expected background from the Standard Model processes is observed. Therefore, upper limits on the charged Higgs boson production cross section times its branching ratio to tau-lepton and its associated neutrino are set at a 95\% Confidence Level. The results are also interpreted in the context of the hMSSM and $m^{mod -}_{h}$ benchmark scenarios of the MSSM. Due to the enhancement of the charged Higgs boson coupling to tau-leptons at high values of the $\tan\beta$ parameter of the MSSM, it is possible to exclude the high $\tan\beta$ region in the $M_{H^{\pm}}$--$\tan\beta$ parameter space. In this work, $\tan\beta$ values around 60 are excluded up to a charged Higgs boson mass of $1400~\GeV$. Furthermore, in the low mass region, below $170~GeV$, all values of $\tan\beta$ in range 1--60 are excluded at 95\% confidence level.

Document type:
Thesis
Rights:
This thesis may be printed or downloaded for non-commercial research and scholarly purposes. Copyright remains with the author.
File(s):
Senior supervisor:
Dugan O'Neil
Department:
Science: Department of Physics
Thesis type:
(Thesis) Ph.D.
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