Calibration of b-tagging efficiency and search for Dark Matter production in association with heavy flavour quarks with the ATLAS experiment

Sammanfattning: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful and complex particle accelerator ever built. The ATLAS detector is a general-purpose particle detector at the LHC, designed to cover a wide range of physics measurements.This thesis presents two physics studies performed using data of proton-proton collisions collected with the ATLAS detector at √s = 8 TeV.The identication of jets originating from b quarks (b-tagging) is a crucial tool for many physics analyses at the LHC. A new technique to calibrate the efficiency of b-tagging algorithms using high transverse momentum jets is described. This technique allows to perform the calibration using jets with transverse momenta up to 1200 GeV, while the current calibration methods only reach approximately 300 GeV. The results of the calibration are presented. The second study presented in this thesis is a search for Dark Matter (DM) production in association with a pair of heavy flavour quarks. A reinterpretation of the results of the ATLAS search for DM at √s = 8 TeV has been done based on simplied models. A set of simplied models with various DM masses, masses of the exchange particle, that mediates the interaction between DM and the regular matter, and couplings is considered. This study aims to choose benchmark models to be used in future searches at √s = 13 TeV.Additionally an accomplished technical project on the development of the b-tagging ATLAS software is presented.