Type B

• L11: "generic search" --> "search".
  By "generic" you mean that is is not specific of a model. For this reason search without any qualifier or restrictive adjective is sufficient. The usage of generic is giving the impression that the search is unfocused and thus not very decisive.
• L31-33: Are the two sentences meant to be both there, or do they just state the same thing?
• L38: "... "natural" SUSY model... " --> The quotes imply that the word is not used with its standard or default meaning. In other words, it is jargon. Therefore an explanation of what is meant by "natural" (or a reference) is required in the paper.
• L49 and L51: "missing transverse momentum" has not yet been defined. At L43, you introduced the concept of momentum imbalance in the transverse plane, and referred to Section 3 for further defintion. We suggest to reformulate the sentence using that concept. Alternatively you should define what missing transverse momentum is.
• Section 2: You do not give any figure of the reconstruction performance and calibrations of the CMS detector. Yet, your analysis relies on them. For example, the analysis of gamma+jet events extends up to 1 TeV missing HT and thus implicitly relies on the knowledge of the energy calibration and response linearity of the CMS detector to photons up to 1 TeV. References to recent detector performance papers (see PubCom twiki) would be useful here.
• L91: DR needs definition as sqrt(eta^2 + phi^2).
• L93: In order to make the measurement understandable and reproducible, you have to say, or give a reference to explain, how the pT_sum is corrected for the pileup contribution.
• L99: "missing transverse momentum" is again used without defintion. The definition here may be not trivial, as the pflow algorithm used at the analysis level, is not necessarily the one that was used to derive MET at the trigger level. Please specify.
• L101: The efficiency is >99% "for all jet multiplicities" do you mean that it is inclusively greater than 99% for the jet multiplicities considered or that it is greater than 99% for each of the jet multiplicity intervals considered? (and please write "greater than 99%", rather than ">99%", as suggested in TypeA comments).
• L135: "Residual QCD contribution to the gamma+jet control sample is measured ... " is unclear. It would be clearer to say that "the contribution to the gamma+jet control sample due to events where the photon candidate originates from misidentification of jet fragments is measured ..."
• L145: By "*a* ratio relating the production cross section of the two processes" do you mean "*the* ratio of the production cross section of the two processes* or do you mean that there is some other (more complex) relationships between the two cross sections? In one case, just write what the ratio is, in the other case please specify what are you alluding to with "relating" so that the measurement can be understood and reproduced by the readers.
• L170: The symbol E_T with a slash (for ET missing) does not seem to have been introduced earlier, and it is not defined here. The definition of missing ET is still outstanding.
• L173: "to suppress possible new physics signal contamination, i.e. the signal events resulting in the mu+jet sample ..." --> We suggest to shorten the sentence to "... to suppress possible signal events in the mu+jet sample ...". In fact, the concept of "new physics" has not been introduced (and it is anyway questionable). On the contrary, it has been stated very clearly what "signal" is for this paper.
• L178-179: Do these efficiencies depend on pT or are they just an inclusive value?
• L183: It is hard to understand at a first reading that this paragraph describes a closure of the method on the MC simulation, and that it does not use data. To dissipate confusion we suggest to drop "based on the data" on L183, and perhaps start the paragraph with a sentence that clearly says that the method has been run on MC events (e.g. "This method has been validated using simulated samples of tt and W+jet events... ")
• L198: "results in 10-25% ..." what does the range stand for? The relative difference should be one number, plus an uncertainty. Please clarify.
• L202-203: "... less than 4% ... additional uncertainty of 3% ...". From this sentence is seems that 4% is a small number that does not require a better specification, but 3% is instead important. It is also unclear from the discussion of the systematic uncetainties how they are treated, and whether they are added in quadrature or differently.
• L210-225: The discussion is difficult to follow and the logic mixed. In particular,
  • L213: what is it "*a* simulated response function"? Is it a generic one? Isn't the paper referring to "*the* simulated response function", which is determined as discussed at L215-217? If so, wouldn't it be better to write L215-218 right after the previous sentence (i.e. " randomly from the response function ... lepton. The response function is obtained from ... hundred times for each event")? In this way all the statement related to the response function come in a row without interruption. Then, you may continue with "The Njets, ... of the events are recalculated ... background".
  • L218: "In order to sample the complete response template". What is a template here? What about "In order to sample the response function completely, ..."? (And then you have to replace "template" with "function" also at L232)
  • L219-225: The logic appears swapped. Say first that you correct your background predictions to take into account efficiency and accptance and all that (your L222-225), and then explain how they are estimated and with which uncertainty (your L219-222).
  • L222: The uncertainties quoted here seems smaller than those in the H->tautau analysis (as an example in HIG-13-021). Perhaps, you didn't use the numbers from tag&probe from the POG measurement. Can you clarify?
• L226-228: The validation, or MC closure, assumes implicitly that the tau response function is perfectly known. In fact in MC events, the muon is replaced with a simulated tau, which by construction has exactly the same response function of the taus in MC events with taus. We think, therefore, that the discussion on how the resolution function has been verified in data, and how the corresponding uncertainty (L237) determined, has to be expanded.
• L234: Are these numbers meant to account for the relative uncertainty on the corrections discussed at L221-223? Please clarify?
• L238: There is no discussion of the possible impact of a residual QCD contamination (fake muons) in the low mT region. Was this considered?
• Section 4.4: Estimation of QCD Multijet background: This entire section is difficult to read, and it does not come fully clear to the reader how the rebalance and smear method works. We suggest to try and expand the discussion with reference to the specific comments below:
  • L245 and L251: The text does not explain whether the scalar component of the momenta, or also the directions are adjusted. It is not obvious that the rebalance step should imply jet pTs larger than the true pTs, given the pT cut at 10 GeV. For example, suppose there were three jets, perfectly balanced, of which one had a pT=9.9 GeV and thus was pruned by the cut. The other two would then give a missing pT of 9.9 GeV, which cannot be rebalanced by a change of their scale, but perhaps mitigated by reducing their modula (ideally to zero), if the directions are unchanged. Also, there is obviously more than one solution for each balanced events: scales can be arbitrary moved. Which solution is selected? Is there a minimization relative to the starting configuration in place?
  • L246: Where the pT resolution is taken from is not clarified up to line 261, which is quite far.
  • L245-246: Did you observe events that cannot be balanced within the resolution? If so, what is their fate? Are their retained in the analysis? We guess that signal contamination in this sample should be difficult to rebalance within the resolution, as the signal is expected to have a high MET component.
  • L250: The contamination of 'new physics events' in the sample used for the rebalance and smear is possibly negligible, as you say. But are these events pruned in the procedure as they cannot be balanced properly? (see previous question). If not, the 'new physics' events should be exactly the ones that survive the selections applied to identify the 'signal'. In this case, it is unsure that they can be actually neglected.
  • L262: "that include heavy flavour quarks". Why is this specified? The reader has no clue about any difference in heavy or low quarks phenomenology in this study. And by default he will imagine that the simulation includes all the flavours.
  • L277: "An error ... pileup pp interactions" --> no comment is made on how this uncertainty (btw "uncertainty" not "error" according to CMS rules) is estimated
• L297: sgluino -> qq_bar + Chi_1^+- ===> is the charge conserved? Same in Line 313 (and there is a missing $\pm$ superscritp to the W boson symbol).
• L307: "1-8%" what is the range referring to?
• Figure 5: Quality to be improved. May be split in two panels for low and high jet multiplicities, otherwise labels are barely readable. Please also modify the axis lable Njets [3-5] etc. to match the way the different regions are (or will be, see comment at L36) labelled in the text.

Type A

• Do not use capital letters for every noun (actually every word) in the title and in the title of each subsection and in the title of the paper. This paper is not in German.
• Some fonts (mainly math symbols) have a bad rendering both in Preview and Adobe, it seems that they have not embedded in the PDFfile at creation. Not sure about this though (succede anche ad altri?)

• L4: "jet multiplicity regions" --> The word "region" is used here (and in several other places), while "interval" is actually meant (and more appropriate).
• L5: ".. two sensitive variables - the scalar sum... ". --> Change "-" into a colon ":". A colon is the default punctuation to start an explaination or to start an enumeration, which is the case here.
• L6: "and missing ..." --> "and the missing... " otherwise it may seem that the scalar sum is made of jet transverse momenta and of missing energy.

• L27: "... and thus allowing ... " please ask the language editor to check this sentence. We would have expected something like "and thus allow ... to be performed", where the present tense (as in the previous sentence) follows your choice to use "and" as coordinating conjunction.
• L36: "jet multiplicity regions" --> The word "region" is used here (and in several other places), while "interval" is actually meant.
• L36: "N_jets = [3-5], ...". We suggest to replace this here, and in several occurrences in the rest of the paper (e.g. L222, L231, L277, L284), with "$N_{jets} \in \[3,5] ...$", or alternatively "3 \leq N_{jets} \leq 5", etc., which is the standard math expression to convey the message you are trying to convey (and btw if the last term of your expression is isolated, it reads N_jets=[$\geq$ 8], which is far less clear than N_jets $\geq$ 8.
• L40: "is following", "is keeping". Shouldn't these two be present tenses, to be consistent with the rest of the presentation?
• L59 "6m" --> "6 m"
• L93: please write "less than" instead of "<" as this is a sentence and not a math expression
• L101: please write "greater than 99%", rather than ">99%", as this is a sentence and not a math expression.
• L113: "pile-up" --> no hyphen to be consistent with line 73.
• L123 "... "Rebalance and Smear" (R+S). It predicts ..." --> "rebalance and smear: it predicts ... ".
  There is no need for capitals, and the symbol R+S is never used elsewhere in the paper. The name of the method, presented between quotes, is justified and explaned in the next sentence, which would then be naturally linked to the main one with a colon, rather than separated by a full stop.
• L127: "The methods ... below". This sentence is redundant and can be dropped.
• L135: "with prompt photons" --> "with that of a prompt photon"
• L141: "... of selected candidate gamma+jet events are found to arise from photon+jet..." looks funny: "gamma" is a symbol to indicate a "photon". We propose to write "... of selected gamma+jet candidates are genuine."
• Caption(s) of Fig.1: Remove text below each panel and only indicate (a)-(d) (perhaps in the figure?) . Put all the descriptions in a unique caption at the bottom. Replace "vs" with "as a function of". Use in the caption the same labels used in the plots and define them, i.e. replace the y-axis labels with R_{Z/gamma} and briefly recall its definition ("ratio of the ... production cross sections...", but see question on TypeB comments), the refer to the text for further explanation.
• L179: "nonisolated" should perhaps be "non-isolated"
• L183: "lost lepton" is used with an hyphen elsewhere. Be consistent.
• L189: "and uncertainties" --> " and the corresponding uncertainties" would make the sentence clearer
• L193, L198, L203, L221 (and perhaps elsewhere): "MC" --> "MC simulation". MC can only be used as a qualifier of a noun.
• L208: "p_T^{\mu}". Is the supersript mu needed?
• L226: "W" --> "W boson"
• L250: "new physics events" --> "signal event". As commented earlier, new physics is an uncertain concept, while you have defined clearly in your introduction what a "signal event" is.
• Figure 4 Caption: The legend R+S is not explained. Suggest to change the caption to "prediction based on the rebalance and smear (R+S) method to the expectation ...". Then "Monte Carlo" --> "MC". Also describe selections in the caption, rather as text on the figure.
• L268-269: "Comparison of predicted and true detector level distributions" is unclear. We suggest: "Comparison of the HT, HTslash, and Njets distributions from full MC simulation to the distributions predicted by the rebalance and smear method on the same events are shown in Fig.4"
• L282: "Figure 5". Elsewhere you used "Fig.". Be consistent.
• L302 and L303: "test statistic" is once with the hyphen and once without it. Be consistent.
• L305: ",trigger" --> ", trigger" (with a space)
• L308: "MC" --> "the MC simulation"
• Fig.6: Suggest to remove text below panels, and describe the plots in a single caption.

• Ref.[1]: Shoudn't you add also a reference to the CMS long discovery paper, recently published on JHEP?