Study of Backgrounds to Black Hole Events in the ATLAS Detector

It is planned that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start running in 2008. Protons from opposite directions will collide at the interaction point with a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV. The experimental signatures of black hole formation in the ATLAS detector at the LHC are studied and compared with Standard Model (SM) backgrounds. Black holes can be produced by the √√ large extra dimension model with black hole mass MBH = sˆ, where sˆ is the parton-parton Centre of Momentum System (CMS) energy squared. In the large extra dimension model, quantum gravity can become strong at a TeV energy scale in the bulk space-time, and could lead to microscopic black holes being produced and observed by the LHC experiments. Once black holes are produced in the collider, they will decay to the SM particles by Hawking evaporation. Under this scenario, an analysis was carried out to determine the significance of black hole signals above some SM backgrounds in the ATLAS detector. Five event selection criteria were applied to Monte Carlo black hole and background events. Consequently, the significance of the black hole and background events was far larger than 5σ. However, we did not include all SM backgrounds in this thesis