Étude du calorimètre électromagnétique d'ATLAS avec des muons cosmiques et du boson de Higgs par sa désintégration en 4 muons

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operating since september 2008 will provide proton-proton collisions with a center of mass energy of 14TeV. For experiments like ATLAS, the high luminosity delivered gives the opportunity to search for the Higgs boson and physics beyond the Standard Model. In the first part of this thesis, a study of the electromagnetic calorimeter of ATLAS is performed with cosmic muons. During the commissioning period which began in 2006, the cosmic data were used to measure the performance of this detector and several methods had to be developed in order to analyze them properly. The energy scale and the response uniformity could both be checked to the level of 5%. The second topic of the work is related to the Higgs->ZZ*->4μ channel which is considered as one of the most promising for the Higgs boson discovery. Modications applied to the isolation variables based on the calorimeter and tracker increase the efficiency of the criteria and make them more robust, in particular in the presence of pile-up at high luminosity. An optimal combination of the variables which takes into account the topology of the background events improves the efficiency of the Higgs->ZZ*->4μ signal by 10% and hence increasing the discovery potential of ATLAS.