Study of high mass dimuon production in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

High mass resonances that decay into muon-antimuon pairs are studied using proton-proton collision data taken by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider during 2011 with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. The used data corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5 fb^-1. The study is first done by comparing reconstructed invariant mass distributions with known physics processes in the Standard Model (SM). Then searches for new physics beyond the SM, where new particles such as the heavy neutral Z′gauge boson are predicted, are done on the distribution. There is no significant deviation from the expectations and hence upper limits are set on the production cross section of the various new physics models. (author)