General analysis of decay chains with three-body decays involving missing energy

TL;DR

This paper provides a model-independent framework for analyzing three-body decay chains with missing energy, deriving invariant-mass distributions to determine particle properties without full kinematic reconstruction.

Contribution

It introduces explicit expressions for invariant-mass distributions considering all spin and coupling configurations, enabling independent determination of particle properties from experimental data.

Findings

Derived explicit invariant-mass distribution formulas for all spin and coupling cases

Demonstrated how to extract particle properties from distribution fits

Showed the method's effectiveness through numerical analysis

Abstract

A model-independent analysis of decays of the form C -> l+ l- A (l=e,mu) is presented, including the possibility that this three-body decay is preceded by an additional decay step D -> j C. Here A, C and D are heavy new-physics particles and j stands for a quark jet. It is assumed that A escapes direct detection in a collider experiment, so that one cannot kinematically reconstruct the momenta of the new particles. Instead, information about their properties can be obtained from invariant-mass distributions of the visible decay products, i.e. the di-lepton (ll) and jet-lepton (jl) invariant-mass distributions. All possible spin configurations and renormalizable couplings of the new particles are considered, and explicit expressions for the invariant-mass distributions are derived, in a formulation that separates the coupling parameters from the spin and kinematic information. In a numerical analysis, it is shown how these properties can be determined independently from a fit to the m(ll) and m(jl) distributions.