Searches for exotic heavy quarks decaying into a W-Boson and a b-Quark with the ATLAS experiment

In this thesis, searches for two hypothetical heavy quarks are presented: the fourth Standard Model generation up-type quark t’, and the vector-like quark T, predicted by the new physics models involving extra dimensions or a composite Higgs boson. Both searches assume pair production of the heavy quarks decaying to a W-boson and a b-quark, and are performed in final states with one electron or muon, at least three jets, and significant missing transverse energy. The first search employs the kinematic fitting of the reconstructed quark mass, while the second relies on the artificial neural network method. In both searches no excess of data over the Standard Model expectation is observed, resulting in observed lower bounds on the quark masses of mt’>404 GeV and mT>618 GeV. Both searches are based on proton-proton collision data at 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy collected by the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in 2011.