Speaker
Description
The science mission of sPHENIX is to make precision measurements of heavy flavor,
quarkonia, and jets to quantitatively determine the transport properties and micro-
scopic structure of the quark–gluon plasma created at RHIC. Muon identification in
sPHENIX provides a clean, complementary probe to traditional heavy-flavor identifica-
tion methods, such as secondary vertex tagging and electron identification, enabling en-
hanced sensitivity to bottom quarks, reduced hadronic backgrounds, and independent
constraints that strengthen the overall heavy-quark physics program. In this study,
muon–pion separation is evaluated using calorimeter information from the electromag-
netic calorimeter (EMCal), inner hadronic calorimeter (IHCal), and outer hadronic
calorimeter (OHCal) in sPHENIX. Several shower-related observables—including the
energy-to-momentum ratio, calorimeter energy fractions, tower multiplicity, and shower
dispersion—are combined into a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) discriminant to quantify the
probability that a track is muon-like or pion-like. The performance of the LLR-based
muon identification is assessed across a range of transverse momenta, and both the
muon efficiency and pion misidentification rates are reported. The results provide a
comprehensive characterization of calorimeter-based muon identification and establish
a foundation for robust particle-selection strategies in future analyses.
| Is this an experimental talk? | Yes |
|---|---|
| Is this on behalf of a collaboration? | Yes |
| Which collaboration? | sPHENIX |
| Are you willing to present as a poster if it is not selected for oral presentation? | Yes |