Eur. Phys. J. C (2017) 77: 61
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-4631-1

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Multidimensional phase space methods for mass measurements and decay topology determination

¹ Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA
² Theory Group, Department of Physics and Texas Cosmology Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

^* e-mail: klimek@physics.utexas.edu

Received: 20 December 2016
Accepted: 16 January 2017
Published online: 30 January 2017

Abstract

Collider events with multi-stage cascade decays fill out the kinematically allowed region in phase space with a density that is enhanced at the boundary. The boundary encodes all available information as regards the spectrum and is well populated even with moderate signal statistics due to this enhancement. In previous work, the improvement in the precision of mass measurements for cascade decays with three visible and one invisible particles was demonstrated when the full boundary information is used instead of endpoints of one-dimensional projections. We extend these results to cascade decays with four visible and one invisible particles. We also comment on how the topology of the cascade decay can be determined from the differential distribution of events in these scenarios.