Graduation Semester and Year
Spring 2024
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Physics and Applied Physics
Department
Physics
First Advisor
Haleh Hadavand
Abstract
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, a gracefully crafted collection of particle theories, has made an astounding number of accurate predictions about the properties of particles and the fundamental laws that govern our universe. Among its long list of remarkable successes are the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces, the prediction of elementary particles such as the Higgs boson, and its ability to precisely predict a wide range of particle cross-sections and branching fractions which have been verified experimentally.
Yet despite its immense predictive power, some major problems with the standard model are its failure to accommodate dark matter and the gravitational force, as well as its inability to provide sources of CP violation large enough to produce the observed baryon asymmetry of our universe. It is apparent that extensions to the SM are required to account for these observed phenomena. Particle theorists have developed a plethora of such extensions to account for these observations, some of which include additional scalar particles as part of an extended Higgs sector. Extending the SM by adding a second Higgs doublet either as an independent theory via Two Higgs Doublet Models (2HDM)s, or as part of a more expansive framework like Super Symmetry helps accommodate for some of these observed phenomena. Additionally, an observed tension in lepton flavor universality giving rise to an excess of tau leptons can be explained by the existence of charged Higgs bosons decaying via H plus to tau nu.
Because of its large branching fraction throughout a range of 2HDM parameter space, H+ to tau nu is an attractive decay channel for 2HDM-related searches. This thesis presents the search for charged Higgs bosons in a model-independent manner with a hypothesized mass between 80 and 3000 GeV through the (H+ to tau nu) decay mode, as well as presents the contributions made in the development of the ATLAS collaboration's Tau Identification Neural Network (TauID), a tool used by all the on collaboration to identify hadronically decaying taus.
Keywords
Charged higgs, Beyond standard model, 2HDM, Charged higgs to tau nu
Disciplines
Elementary Particles and Fields and String Theory
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Cardenas, Juan Carlos Jr, "TAU LEPTONS IN THE SEARCH FOR CHARGED HIGGS BOSONS" (2024). Physics Dissertations. 3.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/physics_dissertations/3