RTG Seminar by Dr. Peter Wagner

Abstract:

Final states with hadronically decaying tau leptons play an important part in the physics programme of the ATLAS experiment. Examples are measurements of Standard Model processes, evidence of the Higgs-boson Yukawa couplings to tau leptons, and searches for new physics phenomena, such as Supersymmetry. These analyses depended on robust tau reconstruction and excellent particle identification algorithms that provided suppression of backgrounds from jets, electrons and muons.

I will present a new "particle flow" method of reconstructing the individual charged and neutral hadrons in tau decays with the ATLAS detector which leads to a significant improvement in the tau energy and directional resolution. It further gives access to the individual charged and neutral hadron four-momenta and offers a high purity decay mode selection. These features will play a particularly important role in analyses that exploit tau spin information, such as a measurement of the CP mixture of the Higgs boson in Higgs to di-tau decays.