Improving the performance of the H→ττ analysis by enhancing reconstruction and identification of neutral pions in tau lepton decays with the CMS experiment

The most promising channel to measure the fermionic couplings of the recently discovered Higgs boson is the decay into two tau leptons. While the decay rate into taus is much smaller than that into b quarks, considerably less background is expected. The largest reducible backgrounds in a search for a Higgs boson decaying into tau leptons originate from multijet and W+jets production where hadronic jets are misidentified as tau leptons. Improving the reconstruction and identification of neutral pions would not only increase the purity of reconstructed decay modes of the tau and reduce migration effects but might also help to distinguish tau jets from hadronic jets, thereby suppressing background.