Reconstruction and identification of tau leptons in CMS

Tau leptons constitute an important experimental signature for analyses at the CERN LHC related to Higgs boson, Standard Model, and beyond the Standard Model measurements. We describe the algorithm used by the CMS experiment to reconstruct and identify decays of tau leptons into hadrons and a neutrino during Run-1 of the CERN LHC. The performance of the algorithm is studied in proton-proton collisions recorded at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb$^{-1}$. The algorithm achieves an identification efficiency of typically 50-60\%, with misidentification rates for quark and gluon jets, electrons, and muons that vary between per mille and percent levels.