Measurement Of W~+W~-Production In Proton-proton Collisions At (?)=7TeV With The ATLAS Detector

The ATLAS detector is a general purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) aimed at the discovery of new physics phenomena as well as furthering our understanding of the high energy behavior of the Standard Model (SM), the well established theoretical framework which describes the elementary particles and their interactions except gravity.The LHC is the world’s largest hadron collider designed to provide head on proton proton (pp) colli-sions at14TeV center-of-mass (c.m.) energy and1034cm-1s-1peak luminosity. The LHC also runs in heavy ion mode with lead nuclei collisions at an energy of574TeV per nucleus (2.76TeV per nucleon-pair) at the luminosity of1027cm-2s-1. Both LHC and ATLAS are performing excitingly well since2009. In2011, the ATLAS experiment collected a4.7fb-1pp collisions data at7TeV and is expecting to record another25fb-1of pp collisions at8TeV by the end of2012.This thesis presents a measurement of the SM W+W-production cross section and the determination of the corresponding limits on anomalous triple gauge boson couplings (aTGCs), using the20114.7fb-1pp collisions data at7TeV collected in2011. The measurement allows for a stringent test of the non-Abelian SU(2)×U(1) SM electroweak sector and probes new physics that could manifest itself through aTGCs that may alter the observed production cross section or kinematic distributions. This measurement also provides a good understanding of the irreducible background in searches for the Higgs boson through the Hâ†'W+W-decay channel.The measurement of the W+W-production is based on the analysis of the purely leptonic decay channels with the final states of evev, evμv and μvμlv. The main background processes to the W+W-signal are Z+jets, W+jets, top quarks, and other diboson production, such as WZ, ZZ and W/Z+γ. The Z+jets, W+jets and top background processes are estimated using dedicated data-driven techniques while the other diboson background is estimated from Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation. A total of1325signal candidates are selected from data with an overall estimated background of368.5±60.9. The corresponding measured total cross section is51.9±2.0(stat)±3.9(syst)±0.9(lumi) pb. This result is compatible with the Standard Model Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) prediction of44.-1.9+2.1Pb an has surpassed the precision of results from experiments at the Tevatron accelerator. The fiducial cross section for each channel is also measured and a first differential distribution of the leading lepton transverse momentum spectrum is extracted.Finally, the TGCs of the W+W-Z and W+W-γ vertices are studied by comparing the observed leading lepton transverse momentum spectrum of the W+W-signal to the theoretical predictions with aTGCs included. For a cutoff scale of A=6TeV,95%Confidence Limits are set on ΔκX and λZ in the intervals [-0.061,0.093] and [-0.062,0.065], respectively for Equal Coupling Scenario. These are more stringent limits than those from experiments at the Tevatron accelerator and are competitive with results from experiments at the LEP accelerator. This thesis work has laid a solid foundation for further measurements of the W+W production with the～25fb-1integrated luminosity8TeV recorded data expected by the end of2012, which will further improve the precision and yield more stringent limits on the aTGCs.