Paper detail

Detection of invisible particles at hadron collider experiments through the magnetic spectrometer

The production of invisible particles plays great importance in high energy physics. Large part of interesting electroweak processes include production of neutrinos, while many new physics scenarios predict the existence of similarly weakly-interacting particles. In events with associated production of invisible particles and hadronic jets, the measurement of the imbalance in transverse momentum of the final state particles is the major leverage to reject the otherwise dominant source of backgrounds in hadron colliders, i.e. the generic production of many jets by QCD interactions. Here we discuss a novel technique which utilizes the information derived from the spectrometer, eventually coupled with the more straightforward calorimeter information, to infer the passage of invisible particles. We check the validity of this technique in data and Monte Carlo simulations in a broad range of topologies, starting from the simplest, with two jets in the final state, to the ones with very large jet multiplicities. We also suggest a new way, based on the same approach, to measure the yields and model the kinematics of the QCD multijet background in invisible particles plus jets signatures. The results are derived using data collected with the CDF II detector; we argue that the application to LHC experiments is straightforward.