This paper presents the reconstruction of missing transverse momentum ($p_{ \text{ T}}^{ \text{ miss}}$) 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 $\tau$-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 $p_{ \text{ T}}^{ \text{ miss}}$ `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 $p_{ \text{ T}}^{ \text{ miss}}$ 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 $140~\text{ fb}^{ -1}$ of data, collected by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider between 2015 and 2018. The results demonstrate that $p_{ \text{ T}}^{ \text{ miss}}$ reconstruction, and its associated significance, are well understood and reliably modelled by simulation. Finally, the systematic uncertainties on the soft $p_{ \text{ T}}^{ \text{ miss}}$ component are calculated. After various improvements the scale and resolution uncertainties are reduced by up to 76% and 51%, respectively, compared to the previous calculation at a lower luminosity.
Categories: hep-ex