Flavour-physics benchmarks for tracker-based particle identification at the FCC-ee (2511.17447v1)

Abstract: The correct identification of charged hadrons plays a crucial role in flavour-physics measurements. The final detector configurations at the proposed FCC-ee are yet to be determined and this study aims to contribute to this discussion by benchmarking the particle identification (PID) performance of the proposed CLD and IDEA detectors using fully simulated events. At present, neither detector proposal includes dedicated PID systems, relying instead on information from the tracking subsystems. We estimate the expected level of contamination due to misidentified charged hadrons for $b$-flavour tagging, rare $b\to s$ transitions, and $s$-jet tagging. The PID information provided by silicon trackers, namely time-of-flight and energy-deposit measurements, leads to significant background suppression with high signal efficiency for the low-momentum hadrons considered for same-side $b$-flavour tagging. In order to improve the contamination in rare decays where momenta are in the medium range, only good timing resolution of 30ps and below can yield an improvement of one order of magnitude below the level achieved by kinematic criteria alone. Light-quark jet-flavour tagging requires identification of particles with very large momentum, which is not possible using only time-of-flight or energy-deposit information in silicon. Access to the number of clusters in a drift-chamber setup, as proposed for the IDEA detector however, results in strong background suppression in every case. This suppression can be further improved in some scenarios by time-of-flight resolution of 30-50ps or better. The PID quality generally exhibits only a small dependence on the cluster-counting efficiency. Whether dedicated PID detectors could further enhance flavour-physics sensitivity should be the subject of future study.