What are backgrounds
Figure 1

Representation of the resolved (left) and
boosted (right) regimes of a top-quark pair decay. From the thesis
of M. Missiroli “Searches for top-antitop quark resonances in
semileptonic final states with the CMS detector”
Figure 2

Plot of the invariant mass of 4-lepton final
states from CMS showing the Higgs peak and other contributing
processes.
Figure 3

There’s a lot that goes into this plot!
Data-driven background estimation
Figure 1

A plot of the invariant mass of muon pairs from
CMS open data showing the \(J\psi\)
peak on a falling background.
Simulation-based background estimation
Figure 1

A plot of the ttbar invariant mass from our
analysis with simulation and collision data labeled.