Abstract: Leptons with essentially the same properties apart from their mass are grouped into three families (or flavours). The number of leptons of each flavour is conserved in interactions, but this is not imposed by fundamental principles. Since the formulation of the standard model of particle physics, the observation of flavour oscillations among neutrinos has shown that lepton flavour is not conserved in neutrino weak interactions. So far, there has been no experimental evidence that this also occurs in interactions between charged leptons. Such an observation would be a sign of undiscovered particles or a yet unknown type of interaction. Here the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN reports a constraint on lepton-flavour-violating effects in weak interactions, searching for Z-boson decays into a tau lepton and another lepton of different flavour with opposite electric charge. The branching fractions for these decays are measured to be less than 8.1 x 10(-6) (e tau) and 9.5 x 10(-6) (mu tau) at the 95% confidence level using 139 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of root s = 13 TeV and 20.3 fb(-1) at root s = 8 TeV. These results supersede the limits from the Large Electron-Positron Collider experiments conducted more than two decades ago.

Abstract: Electroweak symmetry breaking explains the origin of the masses of elementary particles through their interactions with the Higgs field. Besides the measurements of the Higgs boson properties, the study of the scattering of massive vector bosons with spin 1 allows the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking to be probed. Among all processes related to vector-boson scattering, the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair is a rare and important one. Here we report the observation of this process from proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139fb(-1) recorded at a centre-of-mass energy of 13TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. We consider two different final states originating from the decays of the Z-boson pair: one containing four charged leptons and another containing two charged leptons and two neutrinos. The hypothesis of no electroweak production is rejected with a statistical significance of 5.7 sigma, and the measured cross-section for electroweak production is consistent with the Standard Model prediction. In addition, we report cross-sections for inclusive production of a Z-boson pair and two jets for the two final states.

Abstract: A search for heavy resonances decaying to a W or Z boson and a Higgs boson in the q(q)over-bar(('))b(b)over-bar final state is described. The search uses 36.1 fb(-1)of proton-proton collision data at root s = 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in 2015 and 2016. The data are in agreement with the Standard Model expectations, with the largest excess found at a resonance mass of 3.0 TeV with a local (global) significance of 3.3 (2.1) sigma. The results are presented in terms of constraints on a simplified model with a heavy vector triplet. Upper limits are set on the production cross-section times branching ratio for resonances decaying to a W (Z) boson and a Higgs boson, itself decaying to b(b)over-bar, in the mass range between 1.1 and 3.8 TeV at 95% confidence level; the limits range between 83 and 1.6 fb (77 and 1.1 fb) at 95% confidence level.