Energy peaks: a high energy physics outlook

TL;DR

This paper reviews how energy distribution analysis of decay products can reveal key information about particle properties and decay processes, with applications in mass measurement, dark matter characterization, and collider physics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of energy peaks methods, highlighting recent advances and future prospects in high energy physics applications.

Findings

Energy peaks help measure particle masses accurately.

Energy distributions can distinguish between different decay scenarios.

Applications include dark matter detection and Standard Model parameter precision.

Abstract

Energy distributions of decay products carry information on the kinematics of the decay in ways that are at the same time straightforward and quite hidden. I will review these properties and discuss their early historical applications as well as more recent ones in the context of i) methods for the measurement of masses of new physics particle with semi-invisible decays, ii) the characterization of Dark Matter particles produced at colliders, iii) precision mass measurements of Standard Model particles, in particular of the top quark. Finally I will give an outlook of further developments and applications of energy peaks method for high energy physics at colliders and beyond.