Particle-level kinematic fingerprints and the multiplicity of neutral particles from low-energy strong interactions

Abstract

The contamination, or background, from uninteresting low-energy strong interactions is a major issue for data analysis at the Large Hadron Collider. In the light of the challenges associated with the upcoming higher-luminosity scenarios, methods of assigning weights to individual particles have recently started to be used with a view to rescaling the particle four-momentum vectors. We propose a different approach whereby the weights are instead employed to reshape the particle-level kinematic distributions in the data. We use this method to estimate the number of neutral particles originating from low-energy strong interactions in different kinematic regions inside individual collision events. Given the parallel nature of this technique, we anticipate the possibility of using it as part of particle-by-particle event filtering procedures at the reconstruction level at future high-luminosity hadron collider experiments.