Abstract: The identification of jets originating from quarks and gluons, often referred to as quark/gluon tagging, plays an important role in various analyses performed at the Large Hadron Collider, as Standard Model measurements and searches for new particles decaying to quarks often rely on suppressing a large gluon-induced background. This paper describes the measurement of the efficiencies of quark/gluon taggers developed within the ATLAS Collaboration, using root s = 13 TeV proton-proton collision data with an integrated luminosity of 140 fb(-1) collected by the ATLAS experiment. Two taggers with high performances in rejecting jets from gluon over jets from quarks are studied: one tagger is based on requirements on the number of inner-detector tracks associated with the jet, and the other combines several jet substructure observables using a boosted decision tree. A method is established to determine the quark/gluon fraction in data, by using quark/gluon-enriched subsamples defined by the jet pseudorapidity. Differences in tagging efficiency between data and simulation are provided for jets with transverse momentum between 500 GeV and 2 TeV and for multiple tagger working points.

Abstract: The Υ(1 S) invariant-mass distribution is investigated for a possible exotic meson state composed of two b quarks and two b quarks, X bbbb. The analysis is based on a data sample of pp collisions recorded with the LHCb detector at centre-of-mass energies s = 7, 8 and 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 6.3 fb. No signi fi cant excess is found, and upper limits are set on the product of the production cross-section and the branching fraction as functions of the mass of the X bbbb state. The limits are set in the fi ducial volume where all muons have pseudorapidity in the range [2 : 0; 5 : 0], and the X bbbb state has rapidity in the range [2 : 0; 4 : 5] and transverse momentum less than 15 GeV/c.

Abstract: The measured branching fractions of B-mesons into leptonic final states derived by the LHCb, Belle and BaBar collaborations hint towards the breakdown of lepton flavour universality. In this work we take at face value the so-called R-D(()*()) observables that are defined as the ratios of neutral B-meson charged-current decays into a D-(*())-meson, a charged lepton and a neutrino final state in the tau and light lepton channels. A well-studied and simple solution to this charged current anomaly is to introduce a scalar leptoquark S-1 that couples to the second and third generation of fermions. We investigate how S-1 can also serve as a mediator between the Standard Model and a dark sector. We study this scenario in detail and estimate the constraints arising from collider searches for leptoquarks, collider searches for missing energy signals, direct detection experiments and the dark matter relic abundance. We stress that the production of a pair of leptoquarks that decays into different final states (i.e. the commonly called “mixed” channels) provides critical information for identifying the underlying dynamics, and we exemplify this by studying the t tau b nu and the resonant S-1 plus missing energy channels. We find that direct detection data provides non-negligible constraints on the leptoquark coupling to the dark sector, which in turn affects the relic abundance. We also show that the correct relic abundance can not only arise via standard freeze-out, but also through conversion-driven freeze-out. We illustrate the rich phenomenology of the model with a few selected benchmark points, providing a broad stroke of the interesting connection between lepton flavour universality violation and dark matter.

Abstract: The phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics is conjectured to have a rich structure containing at least three forms of matter: hadronic nuclear matter, quarkyonic matter and quark-gluon plasma. We justify the origin of the quarkyonic phase transition in a chiral-quark model and describe its formulation in terms of Skyrme crystals.

Abstract: The production cross-section of J/psi pairs is measured using a data sample of pp collisions collected by the LHCb experiment at a centre-of-mass energy of root s = 13TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 279 +/- 11 pb(-1). The measurement is performed for J/psi mesons with a transverse momentum of less than 10 GeV/c in the rapidity range 2.0 < y < 4.5. The production cross-section is measured to be 15.2 +/- 1.0 +/- 0.9 nb. The first uncertainty is statistical, and the second is systematic. The differential cross-sections as functions of several kinematic variables of the J/psi pair are measured and compared to theoretical predictions.