Statistical tests in particle physics

Particle physics emerged as a pioneer discipline in "big science"; experiments are being carried out in accelerators that are increasing in energy and complexity by the collaborations of thousands of physicists from hundreds of institutes in a few dozen countries. In "big science" a research methodology has been developed in which statistics is of great importance to interpret the results obtained from these experiments. Despite the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which contributed to the success of the Standard Model and the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. Based on these motivations, in the present work certain statistical tests based on the “likelihood” method are shown and are applied in high energy physics in the discovery of new phenomena, by making use of the construction of confidence intervals of the model parameters. We focus on properties of methods called statistical “proofs” that allow systematic uncertainties to be included. Also, we work with explicit formulas for the asymptotic distributions of the statistical tests. In addition, we will use a representative data set, called the “Asimov” data set, which provides a method for obtaining the experimental sensitivity of a search or measurement, as well as the fluctuations in that expectation.