Search for a signal of quarks of a fourth generation in same-sign dilepton final states with ATLAS

Currently, a fourth generation of fermions can not be excluded, neither based on theoretical arguments nor by experimental constraints. In this thesis a method developed to extract a signal coming from quarks of such a fourth family with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. The search is performed with the selection of final states containing two same-sign charged leptons, which is a rare Standard Model signature. The signal extraction method presented is a cut-based counting analysis and includes a data-driven background estimation. The analysis is tested on pseudo data which were created from simulated data sets. Furthermore, the uncertainties on the obtained results are estimated by a so-called "Toy Monte Carlo Study". An optimisation of the cuts is finally performed using a multivariate analysis in order to maximise the significance.