Tau lepton identification and reconstruction: A new frontier for jet-tagging ML algorithms

Abstract

Identifying and reconstructing hadronic τ decays (τh) is an important task at current and future high-energy physics experiments, as τh represent an important tool to analyze the production of Higgs and electroweak bosons as well as to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. The identification of τh can be viewed as a generalization and extension of jet-flavour tagging, which has in the recent years undergone significant progress due to the use of deep learning. Based on a granular simulation with realistic detector effects and a particle flow-based event reconstruction, we show in this paper that deep learning-based jet-flavour-tagging algorithms are powerful τh identifiers. Specifically, we show that jet-flavour-tagging algorithms such as LorentzNet and ParticleTransformer can be adapted in an end-to-end fashion for discriminating τh from quark and gluon jets. We find that the end-to-end transformer-based approach significantly outperforms contemporary state-of-the-art τh reconstruction and identification algorithms currently in use at the Large Hadron Collider.