Search for a heavy charged boson in events with a charged lepton and missing transverse momentum from $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV with the ATLAS detector

Understand

A search for a heavy charged-boson resonance decaying into a charged lepton (electron or muon) and a neutrino is reported.

• A data sample of 139 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2015-2018 is used in the search.
• The observed transverse mass distribution computed from the lepton and missing transverse momenta is consistent with the distribution expected from the Standard Model, and upper limits on the cross section for $pp \to W^\prime \to \ell\nu$ are extracted ($\ell = e$ or $\mu$).
• These vary between 1.3 pb and 0.05 fb depending on the resonance mass in the range between 0.15 and 7.0 TeV at 95% confidence level for the electron and muon channels combined.