Soft drop groomed jet angularities at the LHC

Abstract

Jet angularities are a class of jet substructure observables where a continuous parameter is introduced in order to interpolate between different classic observables such as the jet mass and jet broadening. We consider jet angularities measured on an inclusive jet sample at the LHC where the soft drop grooming procedure is applied in order to remove soft contaminations from the jets. The soft drop algorithm allows for a precise comparison between theory and data and could be used to extract the QCD strong coupling constant αs from jet substructure data in the future. We develop a framework to realize the resummation of all relevant large logarithms at the next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy. To demonstrate that the developed formalism is suitable for the extraction of αs, we extend our calculations to next-to-next-to-leading logarithm (NNLL) for the jet mass case. Overall, we find good agreement between our NLL numerical results and Pythia simulations for LHC kinematics and we observe an improved agreement when the NNLL components are included. In addition, we expect that groomed jet angularities will be a useful handle for studying the modification of jets in heavy-ion collisions.