Strike a target with high-energy protons, collect negative pions and kaons with magnetic horns, and let them decay in a long evacuated decay tunnel: and . Absorb residual hadrons and range out muons in shielding. Focusing selects the negative parent sign and therefore enriches muon antineutrinos; other parent decays leave a finite contamination. Monitor the parent flux and use a near detector to constrain the unoscillated spectrum.
A massive segmented calorimeter supplies interaction probability and measures the hadronic shower. Alternate dense absorber plates with scintillation counters or tracking planes, and magnetize the iron or add a downstream magnetic muon detector. The signal is a positive muon plus a hadronic shower; the sign rejects much of the muon neutrino contamination. For a contained muon, its range gives energy; for a penetrating track, curvature gives . Multiple measurements and a field map determine the fitted momentum and sign. Summed calibrated shower response estimates the struck quark's visible hadronization energy, not the energy of a free observable quark. Correct for invisible nuclear losses, noncompensating response, leakage and acceptance. Neglecting target recoil corrections, and .
A general-purpose collider detector surrounds the interaction region with complementary layers. The layout makes the measured signals useful together: tracks establish charged trajectories, calorimeters sum deposited energy, and outer detectors identify penetrating muons.
- An inner vertex detector, usually fine silicon pixels or strips, measures precise hits and displaced decay vertices. A larger tracking volume follows charged trajectories through a magnetic field. Curvature supplies transverse momentum and charge sign; hit geometry and known field determine the track. Neutral particles leave no direct ionization track.
- An electromagnetic calorimeter, using dense crystals or absorber/sampling layers, measures electrons and photons through electromagnetic particle showers. Electrons have matching tracks; unconverted photons ordinarily do not. Segmentation provides position and shower-shape discrimination.
- A deeper hadronic calorimeter samples hadronic showers from hadrons and measures jet energy. Its larger depth contains nuclear cascades; invisible binding losses, leakage and differing electromagnetic/hadronic response require calibration.
- An external muon detector, behind most of the absorber, records long penetrating tracks. Matching them to inner tracks identifies muons; magnetic instrumentation can give an additional momentum measurement. Hadron punch-through and decays in flight are backgrounds.
- Dedicated particle identification uses specific ionization, time of flight, Cherenkov radiation or transition radiation to distinguish species over appropriate momentum ranges. The choice depends on the collider and physics goals.
- Forward detectors and luminosity monitors cover small polar angles and constrain normalization. Fast trigger and data-acquisition systems select useful collisions within bandwidth limits while recording efficiencies and timing.
Near-hermetic coverage permits a missing transverse momentum estimate from the calibrated vector sum, signaling neutrinos or other invisible particles but also sensitive to detector failures and escaping jets. At a hadron collider the initial parton longitudinal momenta are unknown, so missing longitudinal energy cannot be inferred in the same way; an collider supplies stronger initial-state constraints. Every subsystem needs alignment, calibration and independent control samples for reliable combined reconstruction.
At the Z boson resonance, a tau lepton pair produces two approximately opposite narrow hemispheres, usually with one or three charged tracks per decay, and missing energy from neutrinos. Multihadronic Z boson decays have much higher track multiplicity. Direct and events have two tracks but almost the full beam energy in an electromagnetic calorimeter or muon detector; the tau lepton daughters typically have smaller visible energy. Track directions, calorimetric energy, missing transverse momentum and particle identification together control these backgrounds.
Use a tag-and-probe method: select one hemisphere with an independently understood tau lepton tag, then classify the opposite hemisphere into mutually exclusive decay categories. Correct the category counts for efficiency, migration and background, including an explicit remainder for modes absent from the displayed table. Conditional on a genuine tag, the opposite-hemisphere probabilities sum to one. This avoids assuming that a raw event count equals the number of decaying tau leptons.
An absolute cross-check uses single and double tags. If counts tagged hemispheres and counts events with both hemispheres in mode , thenThe double-tag efficiency need not factorize. Fit all categories with their efficiencies and correlations, imposing the inclusive normalization. The nine displayed entries sum to , not . Renormalizing those entries alone to would bias every quoted branching fraction.