Exploiting the full information carried by jets for reconstructing the mass of the hadronically decaying Z in WZ/ZZ events with a lepton, missing transverse energy and 3 jets at CDF

Observing WZ/ZZ production at the Tevatron in the final state with a lepton, missing transverse energy and two jets is extremely difficult because of the low signal rate and the very large background. In the attempt to increase the acceptance in the analysis of the data collected by the CDF experiment, we study the sample with 3 high-energy jets, where according to simulations about 1/3 of the diboson events are expected to be. Rather than choosing always the two jets of largest transverse energy (ET) to reconstruct the Z mass, we make use of the information carried by all jets. We describe in detail how to better combine the jet information, and introduce a method of interest in every experiment searching for hadronic resonances in the W/Z + jets channel, including measurements of Higgs boson production associated with a W or Z.