Tracking New Physics at the LHC and beyond

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel taggers combining calorimeter and tracking data to detect highly boosted heavy resonances at the LHC, enhancing the ability to discover new particles beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It develops track-based taggers for electroweak-scale resonances, improving detection of highly boosted particles and extending search capabilities at colliders.

Findings

Taggers maintain performance at high boosts

Reconstruction of heavy W' and Z' bosons demonstrated

Constraints on rare Higgs decay channels achieved

Abstract

Heavy resonances are an integral part of many extensions of the Standard Model. The discovery of such heavy resonances are a primary goal at the LHC and future hadron colliders. When a particle with TeV-scale mass decays into electroweak-scale objects, these objects are highly boosted and their decay products are then strongly collimated, possibly to an extent that they cannot be resolved in the calorimeters of the detectors any more. We develop taggers for electroweak-scale resonances by combining the good energy resolution of the hadronic calorimeter with the superior spatial resolution of the tracking detector. Using track-based techniques we reconstruct heavy $W'$ and $Z'$ bosons and constrain the branching ratio of the rare Higgs boson decay $H \to Z A \to l^+l^-$ jets. The taggers show a good momentum-independent performance up to very large boosts. Using the proposed techniques will allow experiments at the LHC and a future hadron collider to significantly extend its reach in searches for heavy resonances.