Use leptonic decays: an isolated high transverse momentum positive electron or muon, together with substantial missing transverse momentum from the neutrino, provides a clean signature. The lepton transverse momentum has a Jacobian scale near , and the lepton–missing-momentum transverse mass has an edge near , broadened by width, recoil and resolution. Lepton identification, isolation and a prompt primary-vertex origin suppress Jets faking leptons and heavy-flavour decays. Missing-momentum quality requirements suppress mismeasured multijet events; a veto on a second oppositely charged lepton suppresses when both are reconstructed. Hadronic decays have a much larger ordinary-QCD background.
Take an on-shell W boson of fixed mass , zero transverse recoil, negligible charged-lepton mass, and unrestricted angular acceptance. In its rest frame the charged lepton has momentum magnitude . A longitudinal Lorentz boost to the laboratory preserves transverse momentum, so
Both angular roots contribute to the same . Set and . The change-of-variable Jacobian determinant has , and the two-root angular weight is . Consequently
This is the ideal W-decay Jacobian peak. The divergence at the endpoint is integrable; it is a change-of-variable effect, not an infinite decay probability. Reversing the polar axis does not change this transverse momentum density, because the sum of the two roots removes the term odd in .