Search for microscopic black holes and string balls in final states with leptons and jets with the ATLAS detector at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for microscopic black holes and string balls in high-energy proton-proton collisions, finding no evidence of such phenomena and setting exclusion limits on their possible production parameters.

Contribution

It provides the first constraints on black hole and string ball production in final states with leptons and jets at 8 TeV using ATLAS data.

Findings

Excluded mass thresholds of 4.8-6.2 TeV for six extra dimensions.

Set upper limits on non-Standard Model production cross-sections.

No significant excess observed beyond Standard Model expectations.

Abstract

A search for an excess of events with multiple high transverse momentum objects including charged leptons and jets is presented, using 20.3 fb^-1 of proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 at a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 8 TeV. No excess of events beyond Standard Model expectations is observed. Using extra-dimensional models for black hole and string ball production and decay, exclusion contours are determined as a function of the mass threshold for production and the fundamental gravity scale for two, four and six extra dimensions. For six extra dimensions, mass thresholds of 4.8-6.2 TeV are excluded at 95% confidence level, depending on the fundamental gravity scale and model assumptions. Upper limits on the fiducial cross-sections for non-Standard Model production of these final states are set.