Extrapolation Technique Pitfalls in Asymmetry Measurements at Colliders

Abstract

Asymmetry measurements are common in collider experiments and can sensitively probe particle properties. Typically, data can only be measured in a finite region covered by the detector, so an extrapolation from the visible asymmetry to the inclusive asymmetry is necessary. Often a constant multiplicative factor is more than adequate for the extrapolation and this factor can be readily determined using simulation methods. However, there is a potential, avoidable pitfall involved in the determination of this factor when the asymmetry in the simulated data sample is small. We find that to obtain a reliable estimate of the extrapolation factor, the number of simulated events required rises as the inverse square of the simulated asymmetry; this can mean that an unexpectedly large sample size is required when determining its value.

10 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (14)

• Measurement of the charge asymmetry in top quark pair production in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV using the ATLAS detector
• Inclusive and differential measurements of the t t-bar charge asymmetry in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
• Inclusive and differential measurements of the t t-bar charge asymmetry in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV
• Measurement of the charge asymmetry in top-quark pair production in the lepton-plus-jets final state in $pp$ collision data at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Measurement of the inclusive leptonic asymmetry in top-quark pairs that decay to two charged leptons at CDF
• Measurement of the charge asymmetry in dileptonic decays of top quark pairs in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV using the ATLAS detector
• Measurement of the charge asymmetry in top quark pair production in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV using a template method
• Measurement of the forward-backward asymmetry in the distribution of leptons in $t\bar{t}$ events in the lepton+jets channel
• Measurement of the charge asymmetry in highly boosted top-quark pair production in $\sqrt{s}=$ 8 TeV $pp$ collision data collected by the ATLAS experiment
• Simultaneous measurement of forward-backward asymmetry and top polarization in dilepton final states from $t\bar{t}$ production at the Tevatron
• First measurement of the charge asymmetry in beauty-quark pair production at a hadron collider
• Measurement of the Forward-Backward Asymmetry in the Production of $B^{\pm }$ Mesons in $p\bar{p}$ Collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 1.96 TeV
• First measurement of the forward-backward asymmetry in bottom-quark pair production at high mass
• On the Forward-Backward Asymmetry of Leptonic Decays of $t\bar{t}$ at the Fermilab Tevatron