Measurements of Angular Correlations in Minimum Bias Events and Preparatory Studies for Charged Higgs Boson Searches at the Tevatron and the LHC

Sammanfattning: Studies of minimum bias events at colliders probe the behavior of QCD in the non-perturbative regime. The phenomenology of events in this regime is described by empirical models that take many parameters, which all need to be tuned to the observed data. Measurements based on angular correlations between the highest transverse momentum charged particle track and the other charged particle tracks in collision events can, because of their robustness against experimental and detector effects, be a component of the tuning inputs for the models. We measure such observables in a variety of pseudorapidity ranges and at many center-of-mass energies at DØ and ATLAS. We observe that such observables are poorly described by current models and tunes that are used to produce simulated event samples, making them valuable information for the tuning process.The Matrix Element method is a powerful analysis tool to extract precise measurements from data samples of limited statistics. We have investigated the potential of the Matrix Element method to measure the mass of the charged Higgs in the exclusive decay H±??±??e±+3? when produced in top quark decays at the Tevatron, with emphasis on the construction of transfer functions in the ? decay chain. We concluded that the ? decay chain can be successfully parametrized via a transfer function and that the method has the potential to provide an accurate charged Higgs mass measurement in this channel.Triggering on ? leptons is a key component for many beyond the Standard Model searches at ATLAS, such as the search for the charged Higgs boson. Events containing Z bosons can be used to measure the efficiency of the ATLAS ? hadronic-decay trigger. We have used a tag-and-probe method on simulated Z boson decays to 2 ? leptons where one decays to a ? while the other decays hadronically. The ? is used as the tag and the ? side is probed. We demonstrated that the efficiency of the ? hadronic-decay trigger can be accurately measured with this method using the first 100 pb-1 of ATLAS data.