Photon Physics at the LHC: A Measurement of Inclusive Isolated Prompt Photon Production at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS Detector (Springer Theses)

This thesis reports on the first studies of Standard Model photon production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using the ATLAS detector. Standard Model photon production is a large background in the search for Higgs bosons decaying into photon pairs, and is thus critical to understand. The thesis explains the techniques used to reconstruct and identify photon candidates using the ATLAS detector, and describes a measurement of the production cross section for isolated prompt photons. The thesis also describes a search for the Higgs boson in which the analysis techniques used in the measurement are exploited to reduce and estimate non-prompt backgrounds in diphoton events. Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction and Theoretical Background....Pages 1-16 The Large Hadron Collider and the ATLAS Detector....Pages 17-39 Data Samples and Event Selection....Pages 41-44 Reconstruction and Identification of Prompt Photons....Pages 45-63 Measurement of the Reconstruction, Identification, and Trigger Efficiencies....Pages 65-79 Background Estimation....Pages 81-104 Measurement of the Inclusive Isolated Prompt Photon Cross Section and Evaluation of Systematic Uncertainties....Pages 105-111 Results of the Measurement and Comparison with Predictions....Pages 113-118 Extending the Measurement with a Larger Data Set....Pages 119-137 Conclusion....Pages 139-144