Pileup corrections on higher-order cumulants

TL;DR

This paper introduces a recursive method to accurately remove pileup event contributions from higher-order cumulants in particle physics data, relying only on pileup probabilities and experimental data.

Contribution

The proposed method uniquely reconstructs true cumulants from pileup-affected data using a recursive approach based on pileup probabilities.

Findings

Successfully reconstructs true cumulants in simple models

Demonstrates effectiveness of the recursive correction method

Discusses systematics related to trigger inefficiencies

Abstract

We propose a method to remove the contributions of pileup events from higher-order cumulants and moments of event-by-event particle distributions. Assuming that the pileup events are given by the superposition of two independent single-collision events, we show that the true moments in each multiplicity bin can be obtained recursively from lower multiplicity events. In the correction procedure the necessary information are only the probabilities of pileup events. Other terms are extracted from the experimental data. We demonstrate that the true cumulants can be reconstructed successfully by this method in simple models. Systematics on trigger inefficiencies and correction parameters are discussed.