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

TL;DR

This paper explores methods for charged hadron identification at future Higgs factories, emphasizing the importance of dE/dx and time-of-flight techniques for improved particle tagging and physics measurements.

Contribution

It reviews detector options and introduces new reconstruction algorithms for charged hadron PID, demonstrating their potential in the ILD detector concept.

Findings

Effective particle identification methods for kaons and protons are identified.

Simulation results show promising physics application prospects.

Different detector configurations 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.