Search for high-mass diboson resonances with boson-tagged jets in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

TL;DR

This paper searches for high-mass diboson resonances in proton-proton collisions at 8 TeV using ATLAS data, setting limits on new heavy gauge bosons and graviton excitations, with a slight excess observed around 2 TeV.

Contribution

It introduces a novel jet tagging technique for highly boosted bosons and provides the first limits on certain heavy resonances in this mass range using this method.

Findings

Observed a 2.5 sigma local excess near 2 TeV in the WZ channel.

Set 95% CL exclusion limits on W' bosons and Kaluza-Klein gravitons.

Excluded W' bosons with couplings in the 1.3 to 1.5 TeV range.

Abstract

A search is performed for narrow resonances decaying into $WW$, $WZ$, or $ZZ$ boson pairs using 20.3 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}$ = 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Diboson resonances with masses in the range from 1.3 to 3.0 TeV are sought after using the invariant mass distribution of dijets where both jets are tagged as a boson jet, compatible with a highly boosted $W$ or $Z$ boson decaying to quarks, using jet mass and substructure properties. The largest deviation from a smoothly falling background in the observed dijet invariant mass distribution occurs around 2 TeV in the $WZ$ channel, with a global significance of 2.5 standard deviations. Exclusion limits at the 95% confidence level are set on the production cross section times branching ratio for the $WZ$ final state of a new heavy gauge boson, $W'$, and for the $WW$ and $ZZ$ final states of Kaluza--Klein excitations of the graviton in a bulk Randall--Sundrum model, as a function of the resonance mass. $W'$ bosons with couplings predicted by the extended gauge model in the mass range from 1.3 to 1.5 TeV are excluded at 95% confidence level.