Searches for new physics through single top

Nowadays particle physics research involves building the largest machines ever built. Detectors the size of a palace buried deep underground, aligned to tiny fractions of a millimeter, observe billions of collisions a second. Large collaborations of thousands of people analyze the unfathomably large amounts of data the detectors produce. A million computers sort through the data running software that is so complex that no-one can even come close to understanding every detail.
These experiments search for deviations from the Standard Model that may point to so-called new physics. The new physics may lead to answers to some of the big open questions of science, such as: Why does our universe contain primarily matter, and hardly any anti-matter? This question of baryogenesis is the main motivation for the analyses described in this thesis.
Chapter 1 gives a short theoretical introduction to single top processes, and describes the theory behind the analyses. Experiment follows the theory, with a description of the ATLAS experiment and the LHC in chapter 2. Once your appetite has been whetted, chapter 3 will provide you with many details on the performance of the detector, the reconstruction of physics objects in the detector and the simulation of collisions and detector response.
Now comes the analysis: a search for excited b quarks in the single top Wt-channel is described in chapter 4. Then we switch channels: an analysis in single top t-channel is spread over two chapters: chapter 5 describes a cut and count measurement of the t-channel cross section and finally chapter 6 describes a search for CP-violation in the t-channel.