Abstract
An inclusive search for anomalous production of two prompt, isolated muons with the same electric charge is presented. The search is performed in a data sample corresponding to 1.6fb-1 of integrated luminosity collected in 2011 at ís=7TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Muon pairs are selected by requiring two isolated muons of the same electric charge with p T>20GeV and |_|<2.5. Minimal requirements are placed on the rest of the event activity. The distribution of the invariant mass of the muon pair m(__) is found to agree well with the background expectation. Upper limits on the cross section for anomalous production of two muons with the same electric charge are placed as a function of m(__) within a fiducial region defined by the event selection. The fiducial cross-section limit constrains the like-sign top-quark pair-production cross section to be below 3.7pb at 95% confidence level. The data are also analyzed to search for a narrow like-sign dimuon resonance as predicted for e.g. doubly charged Higgs bosons (H ±). Assuming pair production of H± bosons and a branching ratio to muons of 100% (33%), this analysis excludes masses below 355 (244)GeV and 251 (209)GeV for H± bosons coupling to left-handed and right-handed fermions, respectively. © 2012 CERN. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the uri xlink:href=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. © 2012 American Physical Society.