Reduce, Reuse, Reinterpret: an end-to-end pipeline for recycling particle physics results

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for your helpful comments on our paper. We have considered all of them carefully, and provide responses to the individual reviewers below. In most cases we have updated the text or figures to either clarify or extend the results as suggested. We agree with the reviewers’ suggestion of submission to SciPost Physics Codebases, and are happy to be resubmitting our revised manuscript.

Referee #1:
Thank you for your helpful comments. We have implemented both suggested changes.


Referee #2:
Thank you for your useful suggestions. We implemented most of the recommended changes, including fixing all broken links and minor changes to figures.

We prefer not to move material from Appendix B into the main body of the text, since the tool described there is not part of the mapyde toolkit. However, we did add installation instructions, and some notes on running options and example commands.

Figure 1 was updated according to your comments, as was Figure 4. The label for Listing A/1 was corrected.

We added heatmaps to Figures 2 and 7, as suggested – this took some effort, and required a reprocessing of the mapyde Higgsino grid to align with the ATLAS grid, but we agree this provides a much more robust validation of the analysis chain. Thank you for this suggestion!

Finally, we clarified the implementation of DM/g-2 constraints in the text.


Referee #3:

Thank you for your useful comments. The first and most substantive point raised in the summary and list of requested changes concerns combinations of searches, which we agree is an interesting and important aspect of the LHC search program, particularly for analyses that use simplified models. However, it is not something that the mapyde toolkit was constructed to address. We elaborate more in our detailed responses below, and we will think carefully about whether and how a tool like mapyde can facilitate combinations of searches in the future, but that will have to be addressed in a future work.

We have added text to the paper clarifying the nature of the NLO corrections, and added an appendix with the delphes lepton efficiencies used in the reinterpretation.

We agree with the reviewer that the slepton-wino-bino grid is not necessarily realistic, though we still feel the reinterpretation of the ATLAS searches in this model is useful. We agree that realistic models would likely include slepton decays through charginos. We ignored them because the branching fractions necessary to produce 2 opposite-sign, same-flavor leptons are far less favorable in the chargino decay channel, and the corresponding leptons are significantly softer, leading to worse reconstruction efficiencies and overall very small event yields in the ATLAS signal regions. We also wanted to keep the differences with respect to the ATLAS simplified model as small as possible, and in the case where the N2-N1 splitting vanishes, the slepton-wino-bino model considered here converges to the slepton-bino model from the ATLAS note. We have added a footnote with this information.

We have modified Figure 8 to clarify the final state and avoid implying that the W bosons mediating the chargino decays are on-shell.

We have also clarified the caption of Figure 9 to reflect the correct number of light neutralinos, and added the ATLAS WinoBino exclusion contour to the plot. We agree that the “fraction of models excluded” may not be a perfect metric for the strength of the analysis, but it is a common way to demonstrate the reach of a search when scanning over pMSSM model parameters.


Thank you all once again.
With best wishes,
Giordon, Camila, and Mike