I consider the two-body decay of a particle at a hadron collider into a visible and an invisible particle, generalizing W -> ev, where the masses of the decaying particle and the invisible decay particle are, a priori, unknown. I prove that the transverse mass, when maximized over possible kinematic configurations, can be used to determine both of the unknown masses. I argue that the proof can be generalized to cover cases such as decays of pair-produced superpartners to the lightest, stable superpartner at the Large Hadron Collider.
Jian Wang, Matthias Finger, Qian Wang, Yiming Li, João Miguel das Neves Duarte, Matthias Wolf, Varun Sharma, Yi Zhang, Tian Cheng, Yixing Chen, Alexis Kalogeropoulos, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Hua Zhang, Siyuan Wang, Xin Chen, Michele Bianco, Sebastiana Gianì, Sun Hee Kim, Rakesh Chawla, Jan Steggemann, Konstantin Androsov, Anna Mascellani, Federica Legger, Matteo Galli, Gabriele Grosso