Study on the discovery of new heavy,neutral gauge bosons with the ATLAS experiment

In this thesis, a search for a new, heavy, neutral gauge boson, namely the Z’ boson with Standard Model-like couplings, is presented. The study has been performed using the LHC p-p collision data, collected with the ATLAS experiment, at a center of mass energy of √s = 7TeV, covering two different time periods: March-November 2010 and March-June 2011. The total integrated luminosity for these periods was of the order of 42 pb-1 and 1.2 fb-1 correspondingly.