Comments on WH draft v1.1 dated 9 December 2008 Conor Henderson, 17 Dec 2008 P2, L9: 'direct observed experimentally' -> 'directly observed by experiments' % fixed P2, L10: Suggest changing 'current direct experimental limits' to just 'current experimental limits', to avoid using 'direct' twice in the same sentence. % fixed P5, L107: 'must have less' -> 'must contain less' % fixed P5, L116-119: Suggest rephrasing these lines to something like: "In the plug region, we also require a high-pT isolated lepton candidate with E_T>20 GeV, with the same selection criteria as for the central region. In addition, because the QCD contamination is higher in the plug region, we impose stricter criteria on the missing transverse energy. We require that MET_sig>2 ... " % That sounds better, thanks. P7, L174: I think it may confuse the reader to refer to 'mistagged jets' here and shortly afterwards 'mistags' on L180, since the former are negatively-tagged jets, while the latter are the important false positive tags. Unless it's really necessary, I would suggest removing the phrase 'so jets tagged with a negative L_xy are labeled mistagged jets' here. % ok, removed P8, L201: 'input the 16 variables' -> 'input 16 variables' % fixed P8, L203: 'l-quarks jets' -> 'l-quark jets' % fixed P8, L213-214: 'after being tagged by SECVTX' -> 'which were tagged by SECVTX' % fixed P8, L238: use of 'such as' here implies there are also other criteria that you do not mention. Are there others? If not, please replace 'criteria such as ...' with 'criteria of ...' or 'criteria which are ...' % fixed P8, L239: 'enough number of hits' -> 'a minimum number of hits' % fixed P8, L239: 'in tracking detector' -> 'in the tracking detector' % fixed P8, L241-242: please remove the phrase 'because its distribution should be the same as the distribution used for obtaining the fitted function'. You can just say 'the track probability, which by definition should be uniform between 0 and 1 for tracks with a negative signed impact parameter.' % fixed P10, L261: 'The summary of background estimate' -> 'A summary of the background estimates' % fixed P10, L269: I agree that 'due to some limitations' is better than 'due to some unknown reasons', but I'm still not sure about it. Perhaps we could try dropping this phrase entirely, and emphasing that this is something we observe, eg: 'Since MET mismeasurement has been seen to be not well modeled in detector simulations, we estimate the contribution ...' % that works for me. P11: I notice you removed the detailed description of the MET vs ISO method from this draft version. I kind of liked that description, but okay, I guess it's not essential for this paper... % yes, that's the idea. thanks P11, L295-296: 'which causes ... MET trigger bias' -> 'which means the above method is not valid, because of the MET trigger bias' % fixed P11, L297: 'are therefore' -> 'is therefore' % fixed P11, L297: suggest to insert 'instead' between 'used' and 'to' % fixed P11, L300: 'background template' -> 'background templates' % fixed P11, L298: 'electron candidates failed' -> 'electron candidates which failed' % fixed P11, L301: 'The non-W contribution after b-tagging ..' - I found this sentence very hard to follow. Could you try to rephrase it to make it clearer please? % You are right, the sentence does not belong here, removed. P12, L307: suggest putting the definition of taggable jets in parentheses % fixed P13, L343: suggest slight rewording of this sentence to: 'The final results obtained for heavy-flavor fractions are shown in Table I.' % fixed P16, L380: I think you should give more explanation as to how the values of the various efficiency values are obtained. You discuss how the uncertainties on these values are obtained, but not how the value itself is found. You could combine the discussion of central value and uncertainty for each efficiency. % OK, added the discussion. "The factor of $\epsilon_{z_0}$ is obtained from the minibias data, $\epsilon_{trigger}$ is measured from independent triggers, and $\epsilon_\mathrm{lepton\ ID}$ is calculated using $Z\rightarrow ll$ observed data and Monte Carlo samples. $\epsilon _{b\mathrm{tag}}$ is the $b$-tagging scale factor described in Sec.~\ref{sec:btag}." P17, L392: suggest a new paragraph before starting to talk about ISR/FSR. % fixed P17, L401: 'The uncertainty due to the JES uncertainty is calculated' -> 'The JES uncertainty is calculated' % fixed P17, L404: 'Sec X, Y' -> 'Secs. X & Y' ? % fixed P18, L420: '... including correlations between them' - I think this sentence still needs some more work. Maybe try replacing 'between them' with 'between these objects', and putting the whole 'including correlations... ' phrase in parenthesis? % OK, let's try this for now. P18, L428: 'as function' -> 'as a function' % fixed P19, L448-449: 'All distributions ... show good agreement between simulated and observed data. That confirms that our MC modeling is adequate.' I would prefer a different emphasis for this observation. If the comparison of MC to data was done in *control regions*, then it would be fine to state that and otherwise leave the sentence unchanged. But when the comparison is to data that potentially contains signal, the goal is always to observe that signal, and so I personally think it is the wrong emphasis to say that the comparison to data thus validates our MC modelling. I would prefer to leave these 2 sentences out. % Changed to "All distributions are further checked and confirms that the data are well modeled by the Monte Carlo background events in both pretag and tag samples." P19, L 449: At the end of this section on the NN discriminant, you should explain what the output is, to help the reader later understand Fig 3. Eg something like 'The output of the NN is a number between 0 and 1 which quantifies ... etc' % added the sentence. P19, L451-458: This section is not a summary of the background estimates. It is a comparison of the data to the complete background estimate. The text in this section should be edited to reflect this. I suggest to begin with something like: "The observed number of events in data is compared to the expected background in Fig 2, as a function of jet multiplicity. Results are shown for the single and double b-tagging categories separately. For the 2jet sample, Tables VI, VII and VIII show ... etc" % A good suggestion, rephased. P19, L462: Suggest to insert a comma after 'yields' here % fixed Tables VI, VII & VIII: These tables are not just summaries of background estimates. They also give information on the expected Higgs signal and what was actually observed in the data. The captions should reflect this. Also, there is no need to include the 'Njet=2' as a separate line in the table. This information could go in the caption. % fixed as "Predicted sample composition and observed number of $W+2$ jet events..." P22, L485: 'credibility' -> 'confidence' ? % fixed P23, L493: As well as the reference to Fig 4 and Table IX, I suggest including a short verbal summary of the numerical cross-section results here, as you do already in the abstract and the conclusions. % added. P23, L494: 'about' -> 'by about' % fixed P23, L495: 'beyond' -> 'more than' % fixed P23, L495: 'expectations' -> 'expectation' % fixed P23, L496: 'an multivariate' -> 'a multivariate' % fixed P23, L496: you could consider being more expansive here, by eg saying 'a multivariate NN technique to futher enhance sensitivity to the WH signal ...' % rephased P23, L496: similarly, suggest the last phrase be more expansive, eg 'and increasing the acceptance for signal events by including leptons in the forward region of the detector.' % rephased P24, L499: I would mention the CDF detector here in the Summary. I also suggest to include a brief description of the main backgrounds to the search. % Rephased.