Abstract: A search is performed for the electroweak pair production of charginos and associated production of a chargino and neutralino, each of which decays through an R-parity-violating coupling into a lepton and a W, Z, or Higgs boson. The trilepton invariant-mass spectrum is constructed from events with three or more leptons, targeting chargino decays that include an electron or muon and a leptonically decaying Z boson. The analyzed dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data produced by the Large Hadron Collider at a center-of-mass energy of root s = 13 TeV and collected by the ATLAS experiment between 2015 and 2018. The data are found to be consistent with predictions from the Standard Model. The results are interpreted as limits at 95% confidence level on model-independent cross sections for processes beyond the Standard Model. Limits are also set on the production of charginos and neutralinos for a minimal supersymmetric Standard Model with an approximate B – L symmetry. Charginos and neutralinos with masses between 100 and 1100 GeV are excluded depending on the assumed decay branching fractions into a lepton (electron, muon, or tau lepton) plus a boson (W, Z, or Higgs).

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: The standard model of particle physics encapsulates our best current understanding of physics at the smallest scales. A fundamental axiom of this theory is the universality of the couplings of the different generations of leptons to the electroweak gauge bosons. The measurement of the ratio of the decay rate of W bosons to t leptons and muons, R(tau/mu), constitutes an important test of this axiom. Using 139 fb(-1) of proton-proton collisions recorded with the ATLAS detector at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, we report a measurement of this quantity from di-leptonic tt events where the top quarks decay into a W boson and a bottom quark. We can distinguish muons originating from W bosons and those originating from an intermediate t lepton through the muon transverse impact parameter and differences in the muon transverse momentum spectra. The measured value of R(tau/mu) is 0.992 +/- 0.013 [+/- 0.007(stat) +/- 0.011(syst)] and is in agreement with the hypothesis of universal lepton couplings as postulated in the standard model. This is the only such measurement from the Large Hadron Collider, so far, and obtains twice the precision of previous measurements.

Abstract: We update our previous search for trapped magnetic monopoles in LHC Run 2 using nearly six times more integrated luminosity and including additional models for the interpretation of the data. The MoEDAL forward trapping detector, comprising 222 kg of aluminium samples, was exposed to 2.11 fb(-1) of 13 TeV proton-proton collisions near the LHCb interaction point and analysed by searching for induced persistent currents after passage through a superconducting magnetometer. Magnetic charges equal to the Dirac charge or above are excluded in all samples. The results are interpreted in Drell-Yan production models for monopoles with spins 0, 1/2 and 1: in addition to standard point-like couplings, we also consider couplings with momentum-dependent form factors. The search provides the best current laboratory constraints for monopoles with magnetic charges ranging from two to five times the Dirac charge.

Abstract: Electrically charged particles can be created by the decay of strong enough electric fields, a phenomenon known as the Schwinger mechanism(1). By electromagnetic duality, a sufficiently strong magnetic field would similarly produce magnetic monopoles, if they exist(2). Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical fundamental particles that are predicted by several theories beyond the standard model(3-7) but have never been experimentally detected. Searching for the existence of magnetic monopoles via the Schwinger mechanism has not yet been attempted, but it is advantageous, owing to the possibility of calculating its rate through semi-classical techniques without perturbation theory, as well as that the production of the magnetic monopoles should be enhanced by their finite size(8,9) and strong coupling to photons(2,10). Here we present a search for magnetic monopole production by the Schwinger mechanism in Pb-Pb heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, producing the strongest known magnetic fields in the current Universe(11). It was conducted by the MoEDAL experiment, whose trapping detectors were exposed to 0.235 per nanobarn, or approximately 1.8 x 10(9), of Pb-Pb collisions with 5.02-teraelectronvolt center-of-mass energy per collision in November 2018. A superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometer scanned the trapping detectors of MoEDAL for the presence of magnetic charge, which would induce a persistent current in the SQUID. Magnetic monopoles with integer Dirac charges of 1, 2 and 3 and masses up to 75 gigaelectronvolts per speed of light squared were excluded by the analysis at the 95% confidence level. This provides a lower mass limit for finite-size magnetic monopoles from a collider search and greatly extends previous mass bounds.