Abstract: This Letter presents a search for magnetic monopoles with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using an integrated luminosity of 2.0 fb(-1) of pp collisions recorded at a center-of-mass energy root s = 7 TeV. No event is found in the signal region, leading to an upper limit on the production cross section at 95% confidence level of 1.6/epsilon fb for Dirac magnetic monopoles with the minimum unit magnetic charge and with mass between 200 GeV and 1500 GeV, where epsilon is the monopole reconstruction efficiency. The efficiency epsilon is high and uniform in the fiducial region given by pseudorapidity vertical bar eta vertical bar < 1: 37 and transverse kinetic energy 600-700<E-kin sin theta< 1400 GeV. The minimum value of 700 GeV is for monopoles of mass 200 GeV, whereas the minimum value of 600 GeV is applicable for higher mass monopoles. Therefore, the upper limit on the production cross section at 95% confidence level is 2 fb in this fiducial region. Assuming the kinematic distributions from Drell-Yan pair production of spin-1= 2 Dirac magnetic monopoles, the efficiency is in the range 1%-10%, leading to an upper limit on the cross section at 95% confidence level that varies from 145 fb to 16 fb for monopoles with mass between 200 GeV and 1200 GeV. This limit is weaker than the fiducial limit because most of these monopoles lie outside the fiducial region.

Abstract: This Letter presents a search for high mass e(+)e(-) or mu(+)mu(-) resonances in pp collisions at root s = 7 TeV at the LHC. The data were recorded by the ATLAS experiment during 2010 and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of similar to 40 pb(-1). No statistically significant excess above the Standard Model expectation is observed in the search region of dilepton invariant mass above 110 GeV. Upper limits at the 95% confidence level are set on the cross section times branching ratio of Z' resonances decaying to dielectrons and dimuons as a function of the resonance mass. A lower mass limit of 1.048 TeV on the Sequential Standard Model Z' boson is derived, as well as mass limits on Z* and E(6)-motivated Z' models.

Abstract: This Letter presents a search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson to a pair of new (pseudo) scalar particles, H -> aa, where the a particle has a mass in the range 20-60 GeV, and where one of the a bosons decays into a pair of photons and the other to a pair of gluons. The search is performed in event samples enhanced in vector-boson fusion Higgs boson production by requiring two jets with large invariant mass in addition to the Higgs boson candidate decay products. The analysis is based on the full dataset of pp collisions at root s = 13 TeV recorded in 2015 and 2016 with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.7 fb(-1). The data are in agreement with the Standard Model predictions and an upper limit at the 95% confidence level is placed on the production cross section times the branching ratio for the decay H -> aa -> gamma gamma gg. This limit ranges from 3.1 pb to 9.0 pb depending on the mass of the a boson.

Abstract: This Letter presents a search for a hidden-beauty counterpart of the X(3872) in the mass ranges of 10.05-10.31 GeV and 10.40-11.00 GeV, in the channel X-b -> pi(+)pi(-)gamma(1S)(-> mu(+)mu(-)), using 16.2 fb(-1) of root s = 8 TeV pp collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. No evidence for new narrow states is found, and upper limits are set on the product of the Xb cross section and branching fraction, relative to those of the gamma(25), at the 95% confidence level using the CLs approach. These limits range from 0.8% to 4.0%, depending on mass. For masses above 10.1 GeV, the expected upper limits from this analysis are the most restrictive to date. Searches for production of the gamma(1(3)D(J)), gamma(10860), and gamma(11 020) states also reveal no significant signals.

Abstract: This Letter presents a search at the LHC for s-channel single top-quark production in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The analyzed data set was recorded by the ATLAS detector and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb(-1). Selected events contain one charged lepton, large missing transverse momentum and exactly two b-tagged jets. A multivariate event classifier based on boosted decision trees is developed to discriminate s-channel single top-quark events from the main background contributions. The signal extraction is based on a binned maximum-likelihood fit of the output classifier distribution. The analysis leads to an upper limit on the s-channel single topquark production cross-section of 14.6 pb at the 95% confidence level. The fit gives a cross-section of sigma(s) = 5.0 +/- 4.3 pb, consistent with the Standard Model expectation.