Tim Cohen

Jet Substructure by Accident

US/Central
WH11NE - Sunrise (Fermilab - LPC)

WH11NE - Sunrise

Fermilab - LPC

Description
Abstract: We propose a new search strategy for high-multiplicity hadronic final states. When new particles are produced at threshold, the distribution of their decay products is approximately isotropic. If there are many partons in the final state, it is likely that several will be clustered into the same large-radius jet. The resulting jet exhibits substructure, even though the parent states are not boosted. This ³accidental² substructure is a powerful discriminant against background because it is more pronounced for high-multiplicity signals than for QCD multijets. We demonstrate how to take advantage of accidental substructure to reduce backgrounds without relying on the presence of missing energy. As an example, we present the expected limits for several R-parity violating gluino decay topologies. This approach also is amenable to a novel method for determining QCD predictions using templates -- probability distribution functions for jet substructure properties as a function of kinematic inputs. Templates can be extracted from a control region and then used to compute background distributions in the signal region. Using Monte Carlo, we will demonstrate the procedure with two case studies and show that the template approach effectively models the relevant QCD background. This work strongly motivates the application of these techniques to LHC data.
Slides