Understanding the Fake Photon Phenomenon in Dielectron Jets from Dark Photon Decays in Monte Carlo

One theory of dark matter predicts the existence of a dark sector, which is a theoretical complementary model to the Standard Model of particle physics. Within this model there must be a particle responsible for the dark analog to the electromagnetic force, which we would call the dark photon. The premise of our research is based upon electron jets that would form when the theoretical dark photon decays. A complication that we have faced is when the Monte Carlo simulation reconstructs one of the electrons as a photo, and we call these fake photons. Our goal is to understand when these fake photons occur so that we can reconstruct the electron pairs that caused them. This would increase our sensitivity to dark photons.In order to understand that process, we created a selector that can search simulated data for the related particles–the lost and reconstructed electron and the fake photon–and identify them. We compared these particles by creating histograms of all three of them. The histograms themselves compared the number of events vs pseudorapidity or transverse momentum. By analyzing these histograms, we hope to be able to attain a higher reconstruction efficiency for lepton jets of electrons.