Search for First Generation Leptoquarks

Leptoquarks are hypothetical particles that carry both lepton and baryon number and are proposed to exist in several Grand Unification Theories (GUTs) and technicolor models. This work presents a search for first generation leptoquarks at the ATLAS detector using an integrated luminosity of 35 $pb^{-1}$ collected from the 2010 data set. The search is for pair production of leptoquarks in which one leptoquark would decay into an electron/quark pair, and the other into a neutrino/quark pair giving an event topology of one high energy electron, missing transverse energy and two high energy jets. The background, predominantly from associated production of W bosons with jets and of top quarks, is estimated using Standard Model simulated data, normalized to observations in control regions.