Abstract: The electroweak production of Z(v (v) over bar)gamma in association with two jets is studied in a regime with a photon of high transverse momentum above 150 GeV using proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13TeV at the Large Hadron Collider. The analysis uses a data sample with an integrated luminosity of 139 fb(-1) collected by the ATLAS detector during the 2015-2018 LHC data-taking period. This process is an important probe of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism in the Standard Model and is sensitive to quartic gauge boson couplings via vector-boson scattering. The fiducial Z( v (v) over bar)gamma jj cross section for electroweak production is measured to be 0.77(-0.30)(+0.34) fb and is consistent with the Standard Model prediction. Evidence of electroweak Z( v (v) over bar)gamma jj production is found with an observed significance of 3.2 sigma for the background-only hypothesis, compared with an expected significance of 3.7 sigma. The combination of this result with the previously published ATLAS observation of electroweak Z(v (v) over bar)gamma jj production yields an observed (expected) signal significance of 6.3 sigma (6.6 sigma). Limits on anomalous quartic gauge boson couplings are obtained in the framework of effective field theory with dimension-8 operators.

Abstract: A search for light long-lived neutral particles with masses in the O(MeV-GeV) range is presented. The analysis targets the production of long-lived dark photons in the decay of a Higgs boson produced via gluon-gluon fusion or in association with a W boson. Events that contain displaced collimated Standard Model fermions reconstructed in the calorimeter or muon spectrometer are selected in 139 fb(-1) of p s = 13TeV pp collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Background estimates for contributions from Standard Model processes and instrumental effects are extracted from data. The observed event yields are consistent with the expected background. Exclusion limits are reported on the production cross-section times branching fraction as a function of the mean proper decay length c tau of the dark photon, or as a function of the dark-photon mass and kinetic mixing parameter that quantifies the coupling between the Standard Model and potential hidden (dark) sectors. A Higgs boson branching fraction above 1% is excluded at 95% CL for a Higgs boson decaying into two dark photons for dark-photon mean proper decay lengths between 10 mm and 250 mm and dark photons with masses between 0.4 GeV and 2 GeV.

Abstract: A measurement of single top-quark production in the s-channel is performed in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13TeV with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb(-1). The analysis is performed on events with an electron or muon, missing transverse momentum and exactly two b-tagged jets in the final state. A discriminant based on matrix element calculations is used to separate single-top-quark s-channel events from the main background contributions, which are top-quark pair production and W-boson production in association with jets. The observed (expected) signal significance over the background-only hypothesis is 3.3 (3.9) standard deviations, and the measured cross-section is sigma = 8.2(-2.9)(+3.5) pb, consistent with the Standard Model prediction of sigma(SM) = 10.32(-0.36)(+0.40) pb.