Wing Sheung Chan

Acknowledgements If you were an ice cream flavour, you would be my favourite one. — Mindy Gledhill, All About Your Heart So, this is it. This is the end of the journey of Terry Wing Sheung Chan as a physics PhD student. It was an amazing adventure full of new experiences and challenges, and I genuinely enjoyed every moment of it. Studies have shown that people perceive time to be slower when they experience new things, which is probably why the beginning of my four-year study seems so distant to me now. Along the journey, I have met awesome people and was given a lot of support and joy. Here, I would like to thank everyone who has made this journey so extraordinary and unforgettable. The first person that I must thank was the person who brought me to Nikhef to start my PhD life in the first place. Olga, thank you for admitting me and giving me this awesome research topic. Sorry that I wasn’t able to show you this thesis and its results earlier. You had taught me many, many things, not only about physics research, but also about life. Your enthusiasm, positivity, perseverance, braveness and love for life will forever have my admiration and respect. Another special thanks goes to my promoter and the manuscript committee. Nicolo, thanks for being a responsible supervisor in the last year of my study. Prof. Ronald Kleiss, Prof. Stan Bentvelsen, Prof. Raymond Snellings, Dr Sascha Caron and Dr Mengqing Wu, thanks for reading through my thesis critically and providing me with constructive feedbacks to improve it. I also want to thank the wonderful team without which I could not have delivered the analysis in such quality. Stefania, thank you for taking on the role of being my copromoter and daily supervisor, and helping to push the paper towards approval and publication. Daniele, thanks for all the assists and supports you have given me. I have learned a lot from you. Ann-Kathrin, thank you for taking care of the leptonic tau channels. Sorry that I had to let you do all the work alone using the messy analysis framework I left you with. I am still very excited to see what we can achieve with these channels. I must also express my gratitude to the people at CERN and in the ATLAS collaboration who have given the many assists I needed. Many thanks to Noam Hod, Luca Fiorini and Antonio De Maria for being the editorial board of my paper and critically reviewing my 169