Making the most of missing transverse energy: Mass reconstruction from collimated decays

Spannowsky, Michael; Wymant, Chris

Abstract

At hadron colliders invisible particles χ can be inferred only through observation of the transverse component of the vectorial sum of their momenta—missing ET or missing transverse energy (MET)—preventing reconstruction of the masses of their mother particles. Here we outline situations where prior prejudice about the event kinematics allows one to make the most of MET by decomposing it into its expected sum of transverse contributions, each of which may be promoted to a full four-momentum approximating the associated χ. Such prejudice arises when all χ in the event are expected to be light and (anti-)parallel to a visible object, due to spin correlations, back-to-back decays or boosted decays. We focus on the last of these, with boosted semi-invisibly decaying neutralinos widely motivated in supersymmetry (in the presence of light gravitinos, singlinos, photini or pseudo-Goldstini), and demonstrate our simple method’s ability to reconstruct sharp mass peaks from the MET decomposition.

Citation

Spannowsky, M., & Wymant, C. (2013). Making the most of missing transverse energy: Mass reconstruction from collimated decays. Physical Review D, 87(7), Article 074004. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.87.074004

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Apr 4, 2013
• Deposit Date: Dec 12, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: May 21, 2015
• Journal: Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation, and Cosmology
• Print ISSN: 1550-7998
• Electronic ISSN: 1550-2368
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 87
• Issue: 7
• Article Number: 074004
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.87.074004
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1418255