The single top t-channel fiducial cross section at 8 TeV measured with the ATLAS detector

This thesis describes my research work performed from 2010 to 2015 using 8 TeV proton-proton collision data collected with the ATLAS detector.
The ATLAS detector is one of the four major experiments of the LHC collider at CERN. It is a general-purpose detector, designed to record proton-proton collisions. Through the use of various types of subdetectors, the trajectories and energy deposits of particles created in the interaction are recorded. The raw data is processed and then sent to the Grid for further reconstruction and analysis.
The Grid is a distributed computing network, which connects many computing clusters located in various institutes worldwide. This gives the ATLAS collaboration the massive data-processing power that it needs in order to process the recorded data of the detector and simulated events. For this thesis, I heavily relied on the Nikhef Tier 1 Grid-site to analyse 50TB of data, using over a hundred CPU-years.
The ATLAS scientific programme focuses on measurements in a new energy and luminosity domain to understand the generation of mass of elementary particles. Meanwhile, the long elusive Higgs boson has been discovered which confirms the Standard Model prediction. The Standard Model is however considered as incomplete and new physics may be around the corner. Known processes may show subtle deviations between prediction and actual measurements.
The test-case which is pursuit in this thesis is the production of top-quarks. The top-quarks have a mass of about the electroweak scale and decay before the hadronization can start. Hence, the top-quark process offers a possibility to study a bare heavy quark for which accurate predictions exist which are confronted with data in this thesis.