The performance of missing transverse momentum reconstruction and its significance with the ATLAS detector using 140 $$\hbox {fb}^{-1}$$ of $$\sqrt{s}=13$$ TeV pp collisions

Abstract This paper presents the reconstruction of missing transverse momentum ( $$p_{\text {T}}^{\text {miss}}$$ p T miss ) in proton–proton collisions, at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. This is a challenging task involving many detector inputs, combining fully calibrated electrons, muons, photons, hadronically decaying $$\tau $$ τ -leptons, hadronic jets, and soft activity from remaining tracks. Possible double counting of momentum is avoided by applying a signal ambiguity resolution procedure which rejects detector inputs that have already been used. Several $$p_{\text {T}}^{\text {miss}}$$ p T miss ‘working points’ are defined with varying stringency of selections, the tightest improving the resolution at high pile-up by up to 39% compared to the loosest. The $$p_{\text {T}}^{\text {miss}}$$ p T miss performance is evaluated using data and Monte Carlo simulation, with an emphasis on understanding the impact of pile-up, primarily using events consistent with leptonic Z decays. The studies use $$140~\text {fb}^{-1}$$ 140 fb - 1 of data, collected by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider between 2015 and 2018. The results demonstrate that $$p_{\text {T}}^{\text {miss}}$$ p T miss reconstruction, and its associated significance, are well understood and reliably modelled by simulation. Finally, the systematic uncertainties on the soft $$p_{\text {T}}^{\text {miss}}$$ p T miss component are calculated. After various improvements the scale and resolution uncertainties are reduced by up to $$76\%$$ 76 % and $$51\%$$ 51 % , respectively, compared to the previous calculation at a lower luminosity.

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