Charged Hadron Identification with dE/dx and Time-of-Flight at Future Higgs Factories

TL;DR

This paper reviews methods for charged hadron identification at future Higgs factories, emphasizing dE/dx and time-of-flight techniques, and presents simulation prospects for physics applications with the ILD detector.

Contribution

It introduces new reconstruction algorithms and evaluates detector simulation options for particle identification at Higgs factories.

Findings

Effective PID methods for kaons and protons are identified.

Simulation results demonstrate potential improvements in flavor tagging.

Different detector technologies offer complementary PID capabilities.

Abstract

The design of detector concepts has been driven for a long time by requirements on transverse momentum, impact parameter and jet energy resolutions, as well as hermeticity. Only rather recently it has been realised that the ability to idenfity different types of charged hadrons, in particular kaons and protons, could have important applications at Higgs factories like the International Linear Collider (ILC), ranging from improvements in tracking, vertexing and flavour tagging to measurements requiring strangeness-tagging. While detector concepts with gaseous tracking, like a time projection chamber (TPC), can exploit the specific energy loss, all-silicon-based detectors have to rely on fast timing layers in front of or in the first layers of their electromagnetic calorimeters (ECals). This work will review the different options for realising particle identification (PID) for pions, kaons and protons, introduce recently developed reconstruction algorithms and present full detector simulation prospects for physics applications using the example of the International Large Detector (ILD) concept.