Determining backgrounds with misidentified leptons in the ATLAS Higgs boson analysis

Abstract: This thesis presents an analysis of misidentified leptons in the Higgs boson decaychannel H → W W ∗ → lνlν. Misidentified leptons, resulting from jets misidentifiedas leptons, mimic the signal of a Higgs boson decay, resulting in a backgroundcontribution to the signal. The analysis is performed on proton-proton collisions ata center-of-mass energy of 13.6 TeV recorded by the ATLAS experiment at CERN’sLarge Hadron Collider. The estimation of misidentified leptons is done using theso-called Fake Factor method, which is used to assess the contributed backgroundwith misidentified leptons in the signal region. The Fake Factor values increasewith increasing momenta for misidentified electrons while it remains constant formisidentified muons. An analysis of the impact parameters d0 and z0 show thatthe accuracy of the Monte Carlo simulation to correctly predict the contribution ofmisidentified leptons from heavy quarks is high.