Exploring Electroweak Symmetry Breaking with Jet Substructure at the ATLAS Experiment

An important unsolved problem in physics is the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking in the Standard Model. The ATLAS experiment aims to gain insight by studying proton-proton collisions at √s = 14 TeV. In order to differentiate between different theoretical models it is important to measure processes where hadrons are produced, such as the hadronic decay of a W, Z or a Higgs boson. However, these decays produce extremely complex signals in the detector which must be analysed carefully. Jet substructure techniques are presented as a novel approach to analysing hadronic signatures relevant to electroweak symmetry breaking. The potential performance of these techniques is evaluated in detail using simulated ATLAS data. Additionally material related to the use of visualisation software to explore ATLAS data is presented.