Reconstruction and identification of tau lepton decays to hadrons and tau neutrino at CMS

CMS [UCL] Basegmez, Suzan [UCL] Beluffi, Camille [UCL] Bondu, Olivier [UCL] Brochet, Sébastien [UCL] Bruno, Giacomo [UCL] Castello, Roberto [UCL] Caudron, Adrien [UCL] Ceard, Ludivine [UCL] Da Silveira, Gustavo Gil [UCL] Delaere, Christophe [UCL] Favart, Denis [UCL] Forthomme, Laurent [UCL] Giammanco, Andrea [UCL] Hollar, Jonathan [UCL] Jafari, Abideh [UCL] Jez, Pavel [UCL] Komm, Matthias [UCL] Lemaitre, Vincent [UCL] Mertens, Alexandre [UCL] Nuttens, Claude [UCL] Perrini, Lucia [UCL] Pin, Arnaud [UCL] Piotrzkowski, Krzysztof [UCL] Popov, Andrey [UCL] Quertenmont, Loic [UCL] Selvaggi, Michele [UCL] Vidal Maroño, Miguel [UCL] et al.

This paper describes the algorithms used by the CMS experiment to reconstruct and identify tau to hadrons + tau neutrino decays during Run 1 of the LHC. The performance of the algorithms is studied in proton-proton collisions recorded at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 inverse femtobarns. The algorithms achieve an identification efficiency of 50-60%, with misidentification rates for quark and gluon jets, electrons, and muons between per mille and per cent levels.