Abstract:

The question of physics beyond the Standard Model remains as crucial as it was before the discovery of a Higgs boson in at the Large Hadron Collider, as the theoretical and experimental shortcomings of the Standard Model remain unresolved. Many hypotheses addressing these issues predict the existence of new neutral resonances decaying into electron or muon pairs. New particles could also manifest themselves via their contributions to Higgs production and decay rates, and studying vector-boson-fusion Higgs production decaying to two W bosons is of particular interest as it probes our understanding of WW → WW scattering. This talk will present how the very different challenges inherent to these two analyses were overcome, along with results from ATLAS using data collected in Run-I of the LHC.