Reconstruction and identification of tau lepton decays to hadrons and tau neutrino at CMS

TL;DR

This paper details the algorithms developed by CMS to reconstruct and identify tau lepton decays to hadrons and neutrinos, demonstrating their performance in LHC Run 1 proton-proton collision data at 8 TeV.

Contribution

It introduces specific algorithms for tau decay reconstruction and identification, with performance metrics evaluated on real collision data from the CMS experiment.

Findings

Identification efficiency of 50-60% for tau decays

Misidentification rates for jets, electrons, and muons are at per mille to percent levels

Algorithms perform reliably in high-energy proton-proton collisions

Abstract

This paper describes the algorithms used by the CMS experiment to reconstruct and identify tau to hadrons + tau neutrino decays during Run 1 of the LHC. The performance of the algorithms is studied in proton-proton collisions recorded at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 inverse femtobarns. The algorithms achieve an identification efficiency of 50-60%, with misidentification rates for quark and gluon jets, electrons, and muons between per mille and per cent levels.