Section 3

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Section 3.1.1

Par 1

L3/4 : ”while leptonic decays can be indirectly studied from the decay products when processing the DELPHES output” is very vague a sentence, with no real meaning. Suggestion is to drop it. The rest of the section is extremely verbose, and could be replaced by one sentence stating that electron and muon energy/momentum is smeared with resolutions parameterized as a function of pT and eta (and mention that these parameterizations can be changed by the user?). The convoluted explanations about what a typical collider experiment is actually doing is of no interest for the reader, as DELPHES does not do the same anyway. This text could be replaced by a figure showing the resolutions used to reproduce the CMS and ATLAS performance for electrons and muons, as well as a comparison with the actual detector resolutions.

The verbosity of the paragraph has been reduced as suggested by the referee's. The resolutions used to reproduce ATLAS and CMS resolutions, are the ATLAS and CMS resolutions and they are shown in the validation section. In addition, they would be out of context here, since the discussion is supposed to stay general at this level.

Section 3.1.2

Last line : ”Neutral pions are automatically classified as photons”. As al- ready mentioned, neutral pions are not long-lived particles in any generator. Instead they decay promptly to two photons, which obviously are classified as photons. The authors might want to drop the comments about neutral pions.

addressed

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Section 3.2.2

L2/3: ”as these might indicate the production of heavy unstable particles” carries little meaning is the context of this article (and probably in a wider context too) without additional explanation. Suggestion is to drop it.

addressed

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Section 3.2.2

Par 1:

L1/2 : It is not useful to indicate what is done in real experiments. Instead, it is important to describe what is done in DELPHES. 1.8.2 Section 3.1.3

As a general comment, the isolation definition chosen here is very much hadron collider biassed. One would not do the same in e+e- collisions. This comment supports the initial request that the abstract includes a sentence stating that DELPHES is aimed at simulating hadron collider experiments (so far).

That's right, but one of the reasons why we refactored Delphes to make it fully modular is to simplify the task for any user who wants to code his/her own definition of isolation, therefore we don't want to send the message that Delphes is for hadron colliders: the default definition of isolation is appropriate for most of the users, because most of the users nowadays are interested in simulating the LHC conditions, but users interested in ILC, LEP3 (or even LEP1/2) studies only need a very minor amount of work to rewrite the isolation module in Delphes. Actually isolation was one of the most mentioned use cases for modularizing the code, as very different definitions may be used within the very same experiment.

I don't understand this comment. Why is this suited to hadron collider? Can't one change iso requirements but keep the same algorithm for e+e- collider? (to delphes authors)