2024 Theses Doctoral

Catching Some Z's: A Search for Three Massive Vector Boson Production at the LHC

Williams, Daniel Mays

A search for the production of three massive vector bosons with at least one Z boson is presented. 140 fb⁻¹ of pp collisions at center-of-mass energy sqrt(s) = 13 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC from 2015 to 2018 are analyzed. Events with three leptons and at least one reconstructed jet are discussed, targeting the WWZ → lνqqll and WZZ → lνqqll decay channels. Evidence for the searched-for production process is observed. Additional results demonstrating the combination of the three lepton search with searches including four or more leptons are shown. Pending the unblinding and combination of these results, there is potential for the discovery of the searched-for production process.