Abstract: This paper presents studies of the performance of several jet-substructure techniques, which are used to identify hadronically decaying top quarks with high transverse momentum contained in large-radius jets. The efficiency of identifying top quarks is measured using a sample of top-quark pairs and the rate of wrongly identifying jets from other quarks or gluons as top quarks is measured using multijet events collected with the ATLAS experiment in 20.3 fb(-1) of 8TeV proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Predictions from Monte Carlo simulations are found to provide an accurate description of the performance. The techniques are compared in terms of signal efficiency and background rejection using simulations, covering a larger range in jet transverse momenta than accessible in the dataset. Additionally, a novel technique is developed that is optimized to reconstruct top quarks in events with many jets.

Abstract: The production of W boson pairs in proton-proton collisions at root s = 8TeV is studied using data corresponding to 20.3 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity collected by the ATLAS detector during 2012 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The W bosons are reconstructed using their leptonic decays into electrons or muons and neutrinos. Events with reconstructed jets are not included in the candidate event sample. A total of 6636 W W candidate events are observed. Measurements are performed in fiducial regions closely approximating the detector acceptance. The integrated measurement is corrected for all acceptance effects and for the W branching fractions to leptons in order to obtain the total W W production cross section, which is found to be 71.1 +/- 1.1( stat) + (5.7) (5.0) (syst) +/- 1 : 4( lumi) pb. This agrees with the next-to-next-to-leading-order Standard Model prediction of 63.2(+1.6) (-1.4) (scale) +/- 1.2(PDF) pb. Fiducial differential cross sections are measured as a function of each of six kinematic variables. The distribution of the transverse momentum of the leading lepton is used to set limits on anomalous triple-gauge-boson couplings.

Abstract: The distribution of particles inside hadronic jets produced in the decay of boosted W and Z bosons can be used to discriminate such jets from the continuum background. Given that a jet has been identified as likely resulting from the hadronic decay of a boosted W or Z boson, this paper presents a technique for further differentiating Z bosons from W bosons. The variables used are jet mass, jet charge, and a b-tagging discriminant. A likelihood tagger is constructed from these variables and tested in the simulation of W' -> WZ for bosons in the transverse momentum range 200 GeV < p(T) < 400 GeV in root s = 8 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. For Z-boson tagging efficiencies of epsilon(Z) = 90, 50, and 10 %, one can achieve W+-boson tagging rejection factors (1/epsilon(W+)) of 1.7, 8.3 and 1000, respectively. It is not possible to measure these efficiencies in the data due to the lack of a pure sample of high p(T), hadronically decaying Z bosons. However, the modelling of the tagger inputs for boosted W bosons is studied in data using a t (t) over bar -enriched sample of events in 20.3 fb(-1) of data at root s = 8 TeV. The inputs are well modelled within uncertainties, which builds confidence in the expected tagger performance.

Abstract: A search is performed for the production of high-mass resonances decaying into a photon and a jet in 3.2 fb(-1) of proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Selected events have an isolated photon and a jet, each with transverse momentum above 150 GeV. No significant deviation of the gamma+jet invariant mass distribution from the background-only hypothesis is found. Limits are set at 95% confidence level on the cross sections of generic Gaussian-shaped signals and of a few benchmark phenomena beyond the Standard Model: excited quarks with vector-like couplings to the Standard Model particles, and non-thermal quantum black holes in two models of extra spatial dimensions. The minimum excluded visible cross sections for Gaussian-shaped resonances with width-to-mass ratios of 2% decrease from about 6 fb for a mass of 1.5 TeV to about 0.8 fb for a mass of 5 TeV. The minimum excluded visible cross sections for Gaussian-shaped resonances with width-to-mass ratios of 15% decrease from about 50 fb for a mass of 1.5 TeV to about 1.0 fb for a mass of 5 TeV. Excited quarks are excluded below masses of 4.4 TeV, and non-thermal quantum black holes are excluded below masses of 3.8 (6.2) TeV for Randall-Sundrum (Arkani-Hamed-Dimopoulous-Dvali) models with one (six) extra dimensions.

Abstract: The four-lepton (4l, l = e, mu) production cross section is measured in the mass range from 80 to 1000GeV using 20.3 fb(-1)of data in pp collisions at root s = 8 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The 4l events are produced in the decays of resonant Zand Higgs bosons and the nonresonant ZZcontinuum originating from q (q) over bar, gg, and qg initial states. A total of 476 signal candidate events are observed with a background expectation of 26.2 +/- 3.6 events, enabling the measurement of the integrated cross section and the differential cross section as a function of the invariant mass and transverse momentum of the four-lepton system. In the mass range above 180GeV, assuming the theoretical constraint on the q (q) over bar production cross section calculated with perturbative NNLO QCD and NLO electroweak corrections, the signal strength of the gluon-fusion component relative to its leading-order prediction is determined to be mu(gg) = 2.4 +/- 1.0(stat.) +/- 0.5(syst.) +/- 0.8(theory).