Development of a picosecond time-of-flight system in the ATLAS experiment

In this thesis, we present a study of the sensitivity to Beyond Standard Model physics brought by the design and installation of picosecond time-of-flight detectors in the forward region of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The first part of the thesis present a study of the sensitivity to the quartic gauge anomalous coupling between the photon and the W boson, using exclusive WW pair production in ATLAS. The event selection is built considering the semi-leptonic decay of WW pair and the presence of the AFP detector in ATLAS. The second part gives a description of large area picosecond photo-detectors design and time reconstruction algorithms with a special care given to signal sampling and processing for precision timing.The third part presents the design of SamPic: a custom picosecond readout integrated circuit. At the end, its first results are reported, and in particular a world-class 5ps timing precision in measuring the delay between two fast pulses.