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).

Abstract: Measurements of normalized differential cross-sections of top-quark pair production are presented as a function of the top-quark, t (t) over bar system and event-level kinematic observables in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of root s = 8 TeV. The observables have been chosen to emphasize the t (t) over bar production process and to be sensitive to effects of initial-and final-state radiation, to the different parton distribution functions, and to non-resonant processes and higher-order corrections. The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb(-1), recorded in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Events are selected in the lepton+jets channel, requiring exactly one charged lepton and at least four jets with at least two of the jets tagged as originating from a b-quark. The measured spectra are corrected for detector effects and are compared to several Monte Carlo simulations. The results are in fair agreement with the predictions over a wide kinematic range. Nevertheless, most generators predict a harder top-quark transverse momentum distribution at high values than what is observed in the data. Predictions beyond NLO accuracy improve the agreement with data at high top-quark transverse momenta. Using the current settings and parton distribution functions, the rapidity distributions are not well modelled by any generator under consideration. However, the level of agreement is improved when more recent sets of parton distribution functions are used.

Abstract: A search for the associated production of the Higgs boson with a top quark pair is performed in multilepton final states using 20.3 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at root s = 8 TeVat the Large Hadron Collider. Five final states, targeting the decays H -> WW*, tau tau, and ZZ*, are examined for the presence of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson: two same-charge light leptons (e or mu) without a hadronically decaying tau lepton; three light leptons; two same-charge light leptons with a hadronically decaying tau lepton; four light leptons; and one light lepton and two hadronically decaying tau leptons. No significant excess of events is observed above the background expectation. The best fit for the t (t) over barH production cross section, assuming a Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV, is 2.1(-1.2)(+1.4) times the SM expectation, and the observed (expected) upper limit at the 95% confidence level is 4.7 (2.4) times the SM rate. The p-value for compatibility with the background-only hypothesis is 1.8s; the expectation in the presence of a Standard Model signal is 0.9 sigma.