Profile of multiboson signals

Abstract

We investigate the visibility of signals characterised by wide bumps over a smoothly falling background that cannot be accurately predicted by Monte Carlo calculations. Examples of such are the wide bumps that triboson and quadriboson resonance cascade decays would yield in diboson resonance searches in fully hadronic final states. We find that the sensitivity to triboson bumps is rather small: signals of a moderate size could be present in current data and yet remain unnoticed. For quadriboson cascade decays the signals can hardly be distinguished from the background in the current searches.