Past exam of the particle physics course of the University of Oxford 2019 1 c ii Solution 2026-10-25
Choose . Important backgrounds include Quantum chromodynamics production of heavy-flavour hadrons with semileptonic decays, in-flight pion or kaon decays, and hadrons penetrating the calorimeters. These generally have accompanying jet activity; semileptonic decays can contain real neutrinos, while jet mismeasurement can fake missing transverse momentum. Heavy-flavour tracks can originate at a displaced decay vertex. Require a high- isolated muon, agreement between inner tracking and the external muon system, and substantial missing transverse momentum inconsistent with detector noise or a mismeasured jet.
The genuine electroweak backgrounds include with one muon lost and . Veto a second reconstructed opposite-sign muon and use the dimuon invariant mass when both are present to reject the Z boson channel. The tau-mediated spectrum is softer and contains extra missing particles; template fits and control samples estimate its residual contribution. Detector acceptance determines how much of the lost-muon background survives.