Purity correction for cumulants of hyperon number distribution

Abstract

We propose a purity correction to subtract effects of combinatorial backgrounds from cumulants of hyperon number distributions. We argue that cumulants and mix-cumulants of sidebands, whose yield is comparable with that of background particles in the signal region, can be used for the correction. The method is demonstrated in a simple toy model by introducing effects of reconstruction efficiencies and backgrounds. We show that topological cut parameters for hyperon reconstructions can be optimized to achieve the best statistical significance after purity and efficiency corrections. The method will enable us to measure cumulants of net-baryon, net-strangenss, and their correlations with better figure of merit than the conventional approach.