A Statistical Method for Improving Momentum Measurement of Photon Conversions Reconstructed from Single Electrons

Abstract

The reconstruction of photon conversions is importantin order to improve the reconstruction efficiency of the physics measurements involving photons. However, there are significant number of conversions in which only one of the two tracks emitted electrons is reconstructed in the detector due to very asymmetric energy sharing between the electron-positron pair. The momentum determination of the parent photon can be improved by estimating the missing energy in such conversions. In this study, we propose a simple statistical method that can be used to determine the mean value of the missing energy. By using simulated minimum bias events at LHC conditions and a toy detector simulation, the performance of the method is tested for several decay channels commonly used in particle physics analyses. A considerable improvement in the mass reconstruction precision is obtained when reconstructing particles decaying to photons whose energies are less than 20 GeV.