Azimuthal decorrelation between leptons in the Drell-Yan process as a probe of infrared QCD: Phenomenology, predictions and measurement of a novel collider observable using perturbative resummation techniques

This thesis presents phenomenological studies of a state-of-the-art NNLL+NLO theoretical calculation of a novel collider observable known as 'phi star'. In these studies the 'phi star' observable, a measure of azimuthal decorrelation, is applied directly to the leptons in the production of massive lepton pairs in hadron collisions (the Drell-Yan process). This provides an alternate measure of the recoil of the massive vector boson (Z/gamma) against initial state QCD radiation, but with distinct experimental advantages over the traditional boson transverse momentum. Attention is focused on the small-'phi star' regime (the quasi-back-to-back regime) where the infrared dynamics of soft/collinear gluon emissions become important. These phenomenological studies are followed up with the presentation of a measurement of 'phi star' in 'Z to mu mu' events using 20.3 fb^-1 of collision data collected by the ATLAS experiment in 2012. Finally, studies directly related to the ATLAS absolute luminosity calibration by the van der Meer (vdM) method are presented, with the objective of elucidating the role of transverse linear beam correlation. In particular, I present studies using an analytical method I have developed in order to precisely extract individual beam information by way of studying phenomena pertaining to the luminous region during vdM scans. In addition, a dedicated study of the long- and short-term stabilities of the principal detectors for luminosity monitoring is also presented, along with an appropriate recalibration of these detectors.