Reconstruction of semileptonically decaying beauty hadrons produced in high energy pp collisions

Abstract

It is well known that in $b$ hadron decays with a single unreconstructible final state particle, the decay kinematics can be solved up to a quadratic ambiguity, without any knowledge of the $b$ hadron momentum. We present a method to infer the momenta of $b$ hadrons produced in hadron collider experiments using information from their reconstructed flight vectors. Our method is strictly agnostic to the decay itself, which implies that it can be validated with control samples of topologically similar decays to fully reconstructible final states. A multivariate regression algorithm based on the flight information provides a $b$ hadron momentum estimate with a resolution of around 60% which is sufficient to select the correct solution to the quadratic equation in around 70% of cases. This will improve the ability of hadron collider experiments to make differential decay rate measurements with semileptonic $b$ hadron decays.Comment: 18 pages, 17 figures. Updated version to be published in JHE