The Search for Exotic Diboson Production in the Semileptonic Channels with the ATLAS Detector

This thesis presents several studies in the search for new physics in the production of electroweak gauge bosons pairs with 36 $fb^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions measured by the ATLAS detector. Processes with electroweak gauge bosons in the final state are sensitive to new physics which alter the electroweak or Higgs sector of the Standard Model. The studies are conducted in the ``semileptonic" decay channels, where one of the electroweak gauge bosons decays hadronically and the other decays leptonically. The groundwork of these studies is established in a search for a new resonant particle which can decay on-shell to pairs of $W/Z$ bosons in the $\ell\nu qq$ channel. No significant excess of data with respect to the background prediction was observed. Therefore, upper limits at the 95\% CLs confidence level are placed on the possible resonant masses in a strongly coupled Heavy Vector Triplet model and on Bulk Randall-Sundrum Gravitons at 3 TeV and 1.7 TeV, respectively. These results are expanded upon with a dedicated study on an ATLAS-wide combination of resonant diboson and dilepton search results. The combination improves the 95\% CLs upper excluded mass values to 5.5 TeV and 2.1 TeV, respectively. In conjunction, a search for non-resonant new physics is conducted through a measurement of the electroweak vector-boson scattering in all semileptonic channels. Evidence for the process was observed at a significance of $2.7\sigma$ and a fiducial cross-section measurement of $\sigma=45.1\pm8.6\,(\mathrm{stat.})^{+15.9}_{-14.6} \,(\mathrm{syst.})$ fb was extracted, consistent with the Standard Model prediction. Lastly, both the prospects of the $\ell\nu qq$ resonance search and the measurement of vector-boson scattering in the High-Luminosity LHC era were evaluated. With 3000 $fb^{-1}$ of proton-proton data, the upper mass limits on new resonances in the $\ell\nu qq$ channel are expected to increase by 1.3 - 2 TeV depending on the benchmark model and the vector-boson scattering cross-section is expected to be measured at the percent level.