0. Verify your background model (is it reasonably flat??) root -l .L tricks.C background(,lowerp,upperp) - try several momentum intervals choose the fit-range as large as possible and make sure that the bg is actually reasonably flat 1. Determine the width of the broad component in the signal from simulation. For this you need to fit the signal in increasingly large fit-ranges to see the monotonous rise in the background-width result. Use the macro tricks.C: root -l .L tricks.C loop(); move the output to a directory of your choice Have a look at the output files named "LargeWidthVsRange__to_.txt". These should show a monotonous rise of the wide component of the correlation with fit range and almost no dependence on momentum. The fit is done sector independent to allow for better statistics 2. Pick the mean value for the wide range and fix this parameter for the macro tricks.C when fitting the next time. This time you fit the signal width assuming a fixed background width - again this is not done sector-wise root -l .L tricks.C loop(); move the result to a directory of your choice Verify that the result of the fit for the narrow component of the distribution is not affected by the fit range anymore after the width of the broad component is fixed! The result can be found in:"SmallWidthVsRange__to_.txt". Of course the result will become more narrow with increasing momentum! 2.b Check whether the free (non-constrained) result for the large width determined from the correlated background agrees reasonably with the one from the wide signal component root -l .L tricks.C loop(0.0,2) 2c. Look at the small component of the correlated background. Find out what the variation with fit range is after fixing the broad component. Check that the narrow components of signal and correlated background are comparable root -l .L tricks.C loop(,2) 3. Fit signal+background together root -l .L tricks.C loop(,1) move the result to a directory of your choice Verify that the signal widths reproduced for the small component are as close as you need to the ones from the fit to the pure signal. If this is the case the paramtrization of signal and background is OK and you can proceed to the production of parameters in experiment and simulation using the tools forseen for this purpose. 4. Test whether the result of the fit of the experimental data is also robust against variation of the fit range (especially the width of the narrow signal-component). Restrict the experimental analysis to one sector like this: root -l .L tricks.C loop(,1,) 5. Verify that the simulated widths and the experimentally determined widths agree reasonably.