The production of a top quark in association with a Z boson is investigated. The proton–proton collision data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in 2015 and 2016 at a centre-of-mass energy ...of s=13TeV are used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.1fb-1. Events containing three identified leptons (electrons and/or muons) and two jets, one of which is identified as a b-quark jet are selected. The major backgrounds are diboson, tt¯ and Z+jets production. A neural network is used to improve the background rejection and extract the signal. The resulting significance is 4.2σ in the data and the expected significance is 5.4σ. The measured cross-section for tZq production is 600±170(stat.)±140(syst.)fb.
A search for long-lived, massive particles predicted by many theories beyond the Standard Model is presented. The search targets final states with large missing transverse momentum and at least one ...high-mass displaced vertex with five or more tracks, and uses 32.8 fb-1 of s=13 TeV pp collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The observed yield is consistent with the expected background. The results are used to extract 95% C.L. exclusion limits on the production of long-lived gluinos with masses up to 2.37 TeV and lifetimes of O(10-2)-O(10) ns in a simplified model inspired by split supersymmetry.
We study the non-Markovian dynamics of a qubit made up of a two-level atom interacting with an electromagnetic field (EMF) initially at finite temperature. Unlike most earlier studies where the bath ...is assumed to be fixed, we study the complete evolution of the combined qubit-EMF system, thus allowing for the coherent backaction from the bath on the qubit and the qubit on the bath in a self-consistent manner. In this way we can see the development of quantum correlations and entanglement between the system and its environment, and how that affects the decoherence and relaxation of the system. We find nonexponential decay for both the diagonal and nondiagonal matrix elements of the qubit's reduced density matrix in the pointer basis. The former shows the qubit relaxing to thermal equilibrium with the bath, while the latter shows the decoherence rate beginning at the usually predicted thermal rate, but changing to the zero-temperature value as the qubit and bath become entangled. The decoherence and relaxation rates are comparable, as in the zero-temperature case. On the entanglement of a qubit with the EMF we calculated the fidelity and the von Neumann entropy, which is a measure of the purity of the density matrix. The present more accurate non-Markovian calculations predict lower loss of fidelity and purity as compared with the Markovian results. Generally speaking, with the inclusion of quantum correlations between the qubit and its environment, the non-Markovian processes tend to slow down the drive of the system to equilibrium, prolonging the decoherence and better preserving the fidelity and purity of the system.
Quantum probability is very different from classical probability. Part of this difference is manifested in the generic inability of stochastic processes to describe the results of multi-time ...measurements of quantum mechanical systems and the fact that the complex-valued temporal correlation functions of quantum theory have no interpretation in terms of multi-time measurements. By analysing experiments involving measurements at more than one moments of time, we conclude that this inequivalence must be manifested either as a failure of the quantum logic or as the inability to define probabilities in multi-time measurements because the relative frequencies do not converge. These alternatives can be empirically distinguished as they correspond to different behaviours of the statistical data in multi-time measurements.