Physical Society Colloquium

Precision Standard-Model Measurements with the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC

Manuella Vincter

Department of Physics, Carleton University

The high centre-of-mass energy and luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN Laboratory provide new hunting grounds for precision tests of the Standard Model, in a region of phase space not previously accessible. These precision measurements are also critical to the Higgs boson and Beyond-the-Standard-Model endeavours at the LHC as SM processes form the backgrounds in searches for new physics. The enormous samples of W and Z bosons, jets, photons, and top quarks recorded by the ATLAS experiment will provide new insight into perturbative QCD as well as detailed measurements of the parton distribution functions of the proton. Many measurements are already limited not by statistical considerations but rather by the understanding of the detector performance and of the Monte-Carlo simulation; both form an integral part of the precision Standard-Model measurement strategy. A selection of Standard-Model measurements made by the ATLAS experiment will be presented.