Title: Particle-flow reconstruction and global event description with the CMS detector,
Abstract: The CMS apparatus was identified, a few years before the start of the LHC
operation at CERN, to feature properties well suited to particle-flow (PF)
reconstruction: a highly-segmented tracker, a fine-grained electromagnetic
calorimeter, a hermetic hadron calorimeter, a strong magnetic field, and an
excellent muon spectrometer. A fully-fledged PF reconstruction algorithm tuned
to the CMS detector was therefore developed and has been consistently used in
physics analyses for the first time at a hadron collider. For each collision,
the comprehensive list of final-state particles identified and reconstructed by
the algorithm provides a global event description that leads to unprecedented
CMS performance for jet and hadronic tau decay reconstruction, missing
transverse momentum determination, and electron and muon identification. This
approach also allows particles from pileup interactions to be identified and
enables efficient pileup mitigation methods. The data collected by CMS at a
centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV show excellent agreement with the simulation and
confirm the superior PF performance at least up to an average of 20 pileup
interactions.