ATLAS releases new b-tagging calibrations
Heavy flavour quark-initiated jets play an important role in the physics programme of hadron colliders. Studies for Higgs boson decays to a pair of bottom quarks, searches for new physics in final states that include top-quarks and innumerable other interesting physics rely on high-performing algorithms to identify jets that include b-hadrons (b-tagging algorithms). Such hadrons are distinct because of the relatively large lifetime of b-hadrons. ATLAS uses graph neural networks to discriminate these jets against more commonly produced jets. The performance of these algorithms has to be evaluated and corrected using data (calibration). Prof Andy Mehta and Dr Nikolaos Rompotis have been working for several years on this task, specializing in a data-driven method to calibrate the algorithm for c-quark initiated jets. The latest result for this effort has recently been released by ATLAS.
More information can be found at:
https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PLOTS/FTAG-2023-05/