Mitigating Large Background in Jet Substructure Observables

¹ Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Ion-beam Application (MOE) and Institute of Modern Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China 200433
² Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
³ C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA
⁵ Theoretical Division T-2, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA

^★ e-mail: dkang@fudan.edu.cn
^★★ e-mail: ytchien@mit.edu
^★★★ e-mail: kunsu.lee@stonybrook.edu
^★★★★ e-mail: yiannis@lanl.gov

Published online: 16 June 2020

Abstract

We discuss a new approach for jet physics analysis by using subtraction between cumulants of jet substructure observables. The subtracted cumulants are insensitive to soft-particle background uncorrelated with the hard process and allow comparisons between theoretical results and experimental measurements without the complication of soft background like underlying and pile-up events. We find our method using jet mass cumulants efficiently eliminates the background in Monte Carlo simulations and ATLAS jet mass measurements and they show a good agreement with our analytic calculations performed using soft-collinear effective theory.