HET Seminar | N-Subjettiness | Speaker: Jesse Thaler (MIT)

Speaker: Jesse Thaler (MIT, Physics)

Many beyond the standard model scenarios predict that the LHC will produce new heavy particles with decay channels involving top quarks, W/Z bosons, and Higgs bosons. If these top quarks and electroweak bosons are sufficiently boosted, then their decays can be misreconstructed as a single fat jet. In this talk, I describe a new jet shape, N-subjettiness, designed to tag boosted hadronically-decaying objects and reject the background of QCD jets with large invariant mass. I will argue that N-subjettiness combines the advantages of jet shapes with the discriminating power seen in previous jet substructure algorithms. I will also suggest that techniques learned from N-subjettiness may be applicable to entire events, pointing toward new algorithms for jet reconstruction.