Study of the $ZZ$ diboson production at CDF II

Abstract

The subject of this Thesis is the production of a pair of massive Z vector bosons in the proton antiproton collisions at the Tevatron, at the center-of-mass energy √s = 1.96 TeV. We measure the ZZ production cross section in two different leptonic decay modes: into four charged leptons (e or μ) and into two charged leptons plus two neutrinos. The results are based on the whole dataset collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), corresponding to 9.7 fb-1 of data. The combination of the two cross section measurements gives (p$$\bar{p}$$→ZZ) = 1.38+0.28 -0.27 pb, and is the most precise ZZ cross section measurement at the Tevatron to date. We further investigate the four lepton final state searching for the production of the scalar Higgs particle in the decay H →ZZ(*) →lll'l'. No evidence of its production has been seen in the data, hence was set a 95% Confidence Level upper limit on its production cross section as a function of the Higgs particle mass, mH, in the range from 120 to 300 GeV/c2.