Abstract

A search is presented for microscopic black holes in a like-sign dimuon final state in proton--proton collisions at sqrt(s)= 8 TeV. The data were collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb-1. Using a high track multiplicity requirement, 0.6 +- 0.2 background events from Standard Model processes are predicted and none observed. This result is interpreted in the context of low-scale gravity models and 95% CL lower limits on microscopic black hole masses are set for different model assumptions.

Highlights

  • The hierarchy problem, in which the Planck scale (MPl % 1019 GeV) is much higher than the electroweak scale (%100 GeV), provides a strong motivation to search for new phenomena not described by the Standard Model of particle physics

  • This paper describes a search for black holes in a likesign dimuon final state

  • The backgrounds from Standard Model processes are divided into two categories for ease of estimation: processes where the two muons come from correlated decay chains and processes that produce like-sign dimuons in uncorrelated decay chains

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The hierarchy problem, in which the Planck scale (MPl % 1019 GeV) is much higher than the electroweak scale (%100 GeV), provides a strong motivation to search for new phenomena not described by the Standard Model of particle physics. If extra dimensions exist and MD is of the order of 1 TeV, microscopic black holes with TeV-scale mass could exist and be produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [4,5,6,7,8]. Since the microscopic black holes can decay to a large number of particles with high transverse momentum (pT), the total track multiplicity of the event is exploited to distinguish signal events from backgrounds. A previous result from ATLAS [12] in this final state excludes at 95% confidence level (C.L.) the production of black holes with MTH 3:3, 3.6, and 3.7 TeV for MD of 1.5 TeV and for n 1⁄4 2, 4, and 6, respectively.

THE ATLAS DETECTOR
DATA AND MONTE CARLO SAMPLES
EVENT SELECTION
BACKGROUND
Correlated background estimates
Uncorrelated background estimates
RESULTS AND INTERPRETATION
AAD et al 7 ATLAS
CONCLUSIONS
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