Kavli Affiliate: Mihoko Nojiri
| Summary:
The system of light electroweakinos and heavy squarks gives rise to one of the most challenging signatures to detect at the LHC. It consists of missing transverse energy recoiled against a few hadronic jets originating either from QCD radiation or squark decays. The analysis generally suffers from the large irreducible Z + jets $(Z to νbar ν)$ background. In this study, we explore Machine Learning (ML) methods for efficient signal/background discrimination. Our best attempt uses both reconstructed (jets, missing transverse energy, etc.) and low-level (particle-flow) objects. We find that the discrimination performance improves as the pT threshold for soft particles is lowered from 10 GeV to 1 GeV, at the expense of larger systematic uncertainty. In many cases, the ML method provides a factor two enhancement in $S/sqrt(S + B)$ from a simple kinematical selection. The sensitivity on the squark-elecroweakino mass plane is derived with this method, assuming the Run-3 and HL-LHC luminosities. Moreover, we investigate the relations between input features and the network’s classification performance to reveal the physical information used in the background/signal discrimination process.
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