Search for strongly produced supersymmetric particles with the ATLAS detector and interpretation in the pMSSM

This thesis has been performed in the context of the search for supersymmetry (SUSY) with the 20.3 fb^{-1} of LHC proton-proton collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at sqrts = 8 TeV. If SUSY is present in nature, squarks (partners of quarks) and gluinos (partners of gluons) are expected to be produced copiously at this energy, leading to events which main signature is no electron nor muon, a large number of jets and missing transverse energy (from the production of the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) leaving the detector unseen) denoted the 0-lepton analysis. The first part of the work presented in this thesis concentrates on the definition of Validation Regions used in the final fitting procedure to better assess the background coming from W-boson and top quark decays to tau leptons. From this fit, and since no excess has been observed, upper limits on various supersymmetric particles production have been derived within simplified models or SUSY models with low number of parameters. The exclusion limits at the 95% confidence level on the mass of the gluino has been set to 1330 GeV for a simplified model incorporating only a gluino and the (massless) lightest neutralino. In the mSUGRA/CMSSM models with tanbeta=30, A0=−2m0 and mu>0, squarks and gluinos of equal mass have been excluded for masses below 1700 GeV. A possible addition of a veto on the events containing tau leptons was also explored by assessing its impact on the exclusion reach of the analysis.The second part of this thesis has been done under the 19 parameters phenomenological Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (pMSSM) interpretation which not only uses the results of the above mentioned 0-lepton analysis but also other ATLAS searches results. The choice of the parameters and their range of exploration has been done on the basis of non-SUSY experimental results such as the rare B-decays, the mass of the SM Higgs boson, the limits from direct DM searches and the upper limit on the cold dark matter energy density of the Universe. The contribution of this thesis starts with the validation of the event selection at the truth and reconstructed levels. Knowing that this is the most constraining ATLAS analysis in the pMSSM parameter space, those checks have been performed with particular care. The constraints obtained with all the analyses on the various sparticle masses are described afterwards, concentrating on squarks, gluinos and neutralinos. The results are discussed for the different natures of the LSP: bino, wino and higgsino. Finally the 0-lepton-only results are described and further explained, first on sparticle mass planes and later on the pMSSM parameters, since only the 0-lepton analysis leads to a well defined statistical procedure that allows to derive properly all those results.