Quark Jets Research Articles

Search for pair-produced vector-like leptons in final states with third-generation leptons and at least three b quark jets in proton-proton collisions at [formula omitted

The first search is presented for vector-like leptons (VLLs) in the context of the “4321 model”, an ultraviolet-complete model with the potential to explain existing B physics measurements that are in tension with standard model predictions. The analyzed data, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 96.5fb−1, were recorded in 2017 and 2018 with the CMS detector at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at s=13TeV. Final states with ≥3 b -tagged jets and two third-generation leptons (ττ, τντ, or ντντ) are considered. Upper limits are derived on the VLL production cross section in the VLL mass range 500–1050 GeV. The maximum likelihood fit prefers the presence of signal at the level of 2.8 standard deviations, for a representative VLL mass point of 600 GeV. As a consequence, the observed upper limits are approximately double the expected limits.

Unraveling gluon jet quenching through [formula omitted] production in heavy-ion collisions

Jet quenching has long been regarded as one of the key signatures for the formation of quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions. Despite significant efforts, the separate identification of quark and gluon jet quenching has remained as a challenge. Here we show that J/ψ in high transverse momentum (pT) region provides a uniquely sensitive probe of in-medium gluon energy loss since its production at high pT is particularly dominated by gluon fragmentation. Such gluon-dominance is first demonstrated for the baseline of proton-proton collisions within the framework of leading power non-relativistic quantum chromodynamics factorization formalism. We then use the linear Boltzmann transport model combined with hydrodynamics for the simulation of jet-medium interaction in nucleus-nucleus collisions. The satisfactory description of experimental data on both nuclear modification factor RAA and elliptic flow v2 reveals, for the first time, that the gluon jet quenching is the driving force for high pTJ/ψ suppression. This novel finding is further confirmed by the data-driven Bayesian analyses of relevant experimental measurements, from which we also obtain the first quantitative extraction of the gluon energy loss distribution in the quark-gluon plasma.

Real-Time Nonperturbative Dynamics of Jet Production in Schwinger Model: Quantum Entanglement and Vacuum Modification.

The production of jets should allow testing the real-time response of the QCD vacuum disturbed by the propagation of high-momentum color charges. Addressing this problem theoretically requires a real-time, nonperturbative method. It is well known that the Schwinger model [QED in (1+1) dimensions] shares many common properties with QCD, including confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and the existence of vacuum fermion condensate. As a step in developing such an approach, we report here on fully quantum simulations of a massive Schwinger model coupled to external sources representing quark and antiquark jets as produced in e^{+}e^{-} annihilation. We study, for the first time, the modification of the vacuum chiral condensate by the propagating jets and the quantum entanglement between the fragmenting jets. Our results indicate strong entanglement between the fragmentation products of the two jets at rapidity separations Δη≤2, which can potentially exist also in QCD and can be studied in experiments.

Resolving the Scales of the Quark-Gluon Plasma with Energy Correlators.

Jets provide us with ideal probes of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in heavy-ion collisions, since its dynamics at its different scales is imprinted into the multiscale substructure of the final state jets. We present a new approach to jet substructure in heavy-ion collisions based on the study of correlation functions of energy flow operators. By analyzing the two-point correlator of an in-medium quark jet, we demonstrate that the spectra of correlation functions robustly identify the scales defined by the properties of the QGP, particularly those associated with the onset of color coherence.

Disentangling quark and gluon jets with normalizing flows

The isolation of pure samples of quark and gluon jets is of key interest at hadron colliders. Recent work has employed topic modeling to disentangle the underlying distributions in mixed samples obtained from experiments. However, current implementations do not scale to high-dimensional observables as they rely on binning the data. In this work we introduce TopicFlow, a method based on normalizing flows to learn quark and gluon jet topic distributions from mixed datasets. These networks are as performant as the histogram-based approach, but since they are unbinned, they are efficient even in high dimension. The models can also be oversampled to alleviate the statistical limitations of histograms. As an example use case, we demonstrate how our models can improve the calibration accuracy of a classifier. Finally, we discuss how the flow likelihoods can be used to perform outlier-robust quark/gluon classification.

Observation of the dead cone effect in charm and bottom quark jets and its QCD explanation

The production of a heavy quark is accompanied by gluon bremsstrahlung which is suppressed at small angles $\Theta\lesssim M_Q/E$ for mass $M_Q$ and high energy $E$ according to perturbative Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) (``dead cone effect''). As particles at small angles typically have large momenta, the heavy quark mass also causes a suppression of high momentum particles. In this paper, we studied this effect in c- and b-quark events using data from Z boson decays in $e^+e^-$ annihilation. The heavy quark fragmentation function for charged particles is reconstructed in the momentum fraction variable $x$ or $\xi=\ln(1/x)$ by removing the decays of the heavy quark hadrons. Indeed, we find an increasing suppression of particles with rising $x$ down to a fraction of $\lesssim 1/10$ for particles with $x\gtrsim0.2$ in b-quark and $x\gtrsim0.4$ in c-quark jets in comparison to light quark fragmentation. The sensitivity to the dead cone effect in the present momentum analysis is considerably increased in comparison to the recently presented angular analysis. This amount of suppression and the differences between c- and b-quark fragmentation are in good quantitative agreement with the expectations based on perturbative QCD within the Modified Leading Logarithmic Approximation (MLLA) in the central kinematic region. The data also support a two parameter description in the MLLA of these phenomena (``Limiting Spectrum''). The sensitivity of these measurements to the heavy quark mass is investigated.

Light quark jet quenching in higher-derivative gravity

We study finite-coupling corrections on the energy loss of light quarks in strongly coupled {mathcal {N}}=4 super Yang–Mills (SYM) plasma. We perform the analysis by computing the stopping distance of an image jet induced by a massless source field, characterized by a massless particle falling along the null geodesic in Einstein gravity with curvature-squared (R^2) corrections. It turns out that the stopping distance in the R^2 theories can be larger or smaller than its SYM counterpart depending on the higher-derivative coefficients. Moreover, we evaluate the stopping distance in the Gauss–Bonnet background and find that increasing lambda _textrm{GB} (a dimensionless parameter in Gauss–Bonnet gravity) leads to a decrease in the stopping distance, thus enhancing the energy loss of light quarks, in agreement with previous findings for the drag force, jet quenching parameter, and the instantaneous energy loss of light quarks using shooting strings.

Prospects for strong coupling measurement at hadron colliders using soft-drop jet mass

We compute the soft-drop jet-mass distribution from pp collisions to NNLL accuracy while including nonperturbative corrections through a field-theory based formalism. Using these calculations, we assess the theoretical uncertainties on an αs precision measurement due to higher order perturbative effects, nonperturbative corrections, and PDF uncertainty. We identify which soft-drop parameters are well-suited for measuring αs, and find that higher-logarithmic resummation has a qualitatively important effect on the shape of the jet-mass distribution. We find that quark jets and gluon jets have similar sensitivity to αs, and emphasize that experimentally distinguishing quark and gluon jets is not required for an αs measurement. We conclude that measuring αs to the 10% level is feasible now, and with improvements in theory a 5% level measurement is possible. Getting down to the 1% level to be competitive with other state-of-the-art measurements will be challenging.

Experimental verification of two types of gluon jets in QCD

The Abelian decomposition of QCD tells that there are two types of gluons, the color neutral neurons and colored chromons. We propose to confirm the Abelian decomposition testing the existence of two types of gluon jets experimentally. We predict that one quarter of the gluon jet is made of the neurons which has the color factor $3/4$ and the sharpest jet radius and smallest charged particle multiplicity, while the three quarters of the gluon jet are made of the chromons with the color factor $9/4$, which have the broadest jet radius (broader than the quark jet). Moreover, we argue that the neuron jet has a distinct color flow which forms an ideal color dipole, while the quark and chromon jets have distorted dipole pattern. To test the plausibility of this proposal, we suggest to analyze the gluon distribution against the jet shape (the sphericity) and/or particle multiplicity from the existing gluon jet events and look for two distinct peaks in the distribution.

Heavy-Flavour Jets in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

Reconstructed jets initiated from heavy quarks provide a powerful tool to probe the properties of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP) and to explore the mass hierarchy of jet quenching. In this article, we review the recent theoretical progresses on heavy-flavour jets in high-energy nuclear collisions at the RHIC and LHC. We focus on the yields and substructures of charm and bottom quark jets with jet-quenching effects, such as the nuclear modification factors, transverse momentum imbalance, angular correlation, radial profiles, fragmentation functions, the “dead-cone” effect, etc.

Z 0 boson associated b-jet production in high-energy nuclear collisions* *Supported by the Guangdong Major Project of Basic and Applied Basic Research (2020B0301030008), the Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou (2019050001), and the NSFC of China (11935007, 12035007, 12247127). S. Wang is supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M701279)

The production of vector boson tagged heavy quark jets potentially provides new tools to probe the jet quenching effect. In this paper, we present the first theoretical study on the angular correlations (), transverse momentum imbalance (), and nuclear modification factor () of boson tagged b-jets in heavy-ion collisions, which was performed using a Monte Carlo transport model. We find that the medium modification of the for + b-jet has a weaker dependence on than that for + jet, and the modification patterns are sensitive to the initial jet distribution. Additionally, with the high purity of the quark jet in + (b-) jet production, we calculate the momentum imbalance and the nuclear modification factor of + b-jet in Pb+Pb collisions. We observe a smaller and larger of + b-jet in Pb+Pb collisions relative to those of + jet, which may be an indication of the mass effect of jet quenching and can be tested in future measurements.

Going off topics to demix quark and gluon jets in αS extractions

Quantum chromodynamics is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks and gluons; the coupling strength of the interaction, αS, is the least precisely-known of all interactions in nature. An extraction of the strong coupling from the radiation pattern within jets would provide a complementary approach to conventional extractions from jet production rates and hadronic event shapes, and would be a key achievement of jet substructure at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Presently, the relative fraction of quark and gluon jets in a sample is the limiting factor in such extractions, as this fraction is degenerate with the value of αS for the most well-understood observables. To overcome this limitation, we apply recently proposed techniques to statistically demix multiple mixtures of jets and obtain purified quark and gluon distributions based on an operational definiton. We illustrate that studying quark and gluon jet substructure separately can significantly improve the sensitivity of such extractions of the strong coupling. We also discuss how using machine learning techniques or infrared- and collinear-unsafe information can improve the demixing performance without the loss of theoretical control. While theoretical research is required to connect the extract topics with the quark and gluon objects in cross section calculations, our study illustrates the potential of demixing to reduce the dominant uncertainty for the αS extraction from jet substructure at the LHC.

An Investigation of Charm Quark Jet Spectrum and Shape Modifications in Au+Au Collisions at \(\sqrt {s_{NN}} = 200\) GeV

An Investigation of Charm Quark Jet Spectrum and Shape Modifications in Au+Au Collisions at \(\sqrt {s_{NN}} = 200\) GeV

Momentum Broadening of Heavy Quarks and Jets in the Glasma from Classical Colored Particle Simulations

We investigate the effects of the pre-equilibrium Glasma stage of heavy-ion collisions on the broadening of momentum for heavy quarks and jets using classical colored particle simulations based on Wong's equations. Confirming previous studies, we find that these probes accumulate momentum on the order of the saturation scale $Q_s$ and that the color field of the Glasma induces an anisotropy with more broadening along the beam axis. For quark jets the anisotropy is more pronounced at lower energies.

Systematic quark/gluon identification with ratios of likelihoods

Discriminating between quark- and gluon-initiated jets has long been a central focus of jet substructure, leading to the introduction of numerous observables and calculations to high perturbative accuracy. At the same time, there have been many attempts to fully exploit the jet radiation pattern using tools from statistics and machine learning. We propose a new approach that combines a deep analytic understanding of jet substructure with the optimality promised by machine learning and statistics. After specifying an approximation to the full emission phase space, we show how to construct the optimal observable for a given classification task. This procedure is demonstrated for the case of quark and gluons jets, where we show how to systematically capture sub-eikonal corrections in the splitting functions, and prove that linear combinations of weighted multiplicity is the optimal observable. In addition to providing a new and powerful framework for systematically improving jet substructure observables, we demonstrate the performance of several quark versus gluon jet tagging observables in parton-level Monte Carlo simulations, and find that they perform at or near the level of a deep neural network classifier. Combined with the rapid recent progress in the development of higher order parton showers, we believe that our approach provides a basis for systematically exploiting subleading effects in jet substructure analyses at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and beyond.

Measurements of the associated production of a W boson and a charm quark in proton–proton collisions at sqrt{s}=8,text {TeV}

Measurements of the associated production of a W boson and a charm ({text {c}}) quark in proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8,text {TeV} are reported. The analysis uses a data sample corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 19.7,text {fb}^{-1} collected by the CMS detector at the LHC. The W bosons are identified through their leptonic decays to an electron or a muon, and a neutrino. Charm quark jets are selected using distinctive signatures of charm hadron decays. The product of the cross section and branching fraction sigma (text {p}text {p}rightarrow text {W}+ {text {c}}+ text {X}) {mathcal {B}}(text {W}rightarrow ell upnu ), where ell = text {e} or upmu , and the cross section ratio sigma (text {p}text {p}rightarrow {{text {W}}^{+} + bar{{text {c}}} + text {X}}) / sigma (text {p}text {p}rightarrow {{text {W}}^{-} + {text {c}}+ text {X}}) are measured in a fiducial volume and differentially as functions of the pseudorapidity and of the transverse momentum of the lepton from the W boson decay. The results are compared with theoretical predictions. The impact of these measurements on the determination of the strange quark distribution is assessed.

Disentangling quarks and gluons in CMS open data

We study quark and gluon jets separately using public collider data from the CMS experiment. Our analysis is based on 2.3/fb of proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV, collected at the Large Hadron Collider in 2011. We define two non-overlapping samples via a pseudorapidity cut -- central jets with |eta| < 0.65 and forward jets with |eta| > 0.65 -- and employ jet topic modeling to extract individual distributions for the maximally separable categories. Under certain assumptions, such as sample independence and mutual irreducibility, these categories correspond to "quark" and "gluon" jets, as given by a recently proposed operational definition. We consider a number of different methods for extracting reducibility factors from the central and forward datasets, from which the fractions of quark jets in each sample can be determined. The greatest stability and robustness to statistical uncertainties is achieved by a novel method based on parametrizing the endpoints of a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. To mitigate detector effects, which would otherwise induce unphysical differences between central and forward jets, we use the OmniFold method to perform central value unfolding. As a demonstration of the power of this method, we extract the intrinsic dimensionality of the quark and gluon jet samples, which exhibit Casimir scaling, as expected from the strongly-ordered limit. To our knowledge, this work is the first application of full phase space unfolding to real collider data, and one of the first applications of topic modeling to extract separate quark and gluon distributions at the LHC.

Azimuthal Angular Correlation as a Boosted Top Jet Substructure.

We propose a novel jet substructure observable of boosted tops that is related to the linear polarization of the W boson in boosted top quark decay, which results in a cos2ϕ angular correlation between the t→bW and W→ff^{'}[over ¯] decay planes. We discuss in detail the origin of such linear polarization by applying Wigner's little group transformation. We show that the unique cos2ϕ angular correlation only exists in the boosted regime but not in the top quark rest frame. We construct an experimental observable for such correlation based on the transverse energy deposition asymmetry in the top jet that does not require the reconstruction of W decay products. The degree of this asymmetry can be used to measure the longitudinal polarization of the top quark, which is an important probe of new physics that couples to the top sector, and can discriminate a boosted top quark jet from its background events, such as QCD jets. A numerical simulation is also performed and found to agree well with the analytic prediction of the standard model.

Spinning gluons from the QCD light-ray OPE

We study the transverse spin structure of the squeezed limit of the three-point energy correlator, leftlangle mathrm{mathcal{E}}left({overrightarrow{n}}_1right)mathrm{mathcal{E}}left({overrightarrow{n}}_2right)mathrm{mathcal{E}}left({overrightarrow{n}}_3right)rightrangle . To describe its all orders perturbative behavior, we develop the light-ray operator product expansion (OPE) in QCD. At leading twist the iterated OPE of mathrm{mathcal{E}}left({overrightarrow{n}}_iright) operators closes onto light-ray operators {mathbbm{O}}^{left[Jright]}left(overrightarrow{n}right) with spin J, and transverse spin j = 0, 2. We compute the mathrm{mathcal{E}}left({overrightarrow{n}}_1right)mathrm{mathcal{E}}left({overrightarrow{n}}_2right) , mathrm{mathcal{E}}left({overrightarrow{n}}_1right){mathbbm{O}}^{left[Jright]}left({overrightarrow{n}}_2right) and {mathbbm{O}}^{left[{J}_1right]}left({overrightarrow{n}}_1right){mathbbm{O}}^{left[{J}_2right]}left({overrightarrow{n}}_2right) OPEs as analytic functions of J, which allows for the description of arbitrary squeezed limits of N -point correlators in QCD. We use these results with J = 3 to reproduce the perturbative expansion in the squeezed limit of the three-point correlator, as well as to resum the leading twist singular structure for both quark and gluon jets, including transverse spin contributions, as required for phenomenological applications. Finally, we briefly comment on the transverse spin structure at higher twists, and show that to all orders in the twist expansion the highest transverse spin contributions are universal between quark and gluon jets, and are descendants of the leading twist transverse spin-2 operator, allowing their resummation into a simple two-dimensional Euclidean conformal block. Due to the general applicability of our results to arbitrary correlation functions of energy flow operators, we anticipate that they can be widely applied to improving our understanding of jet substructure at the LHC.

Quarks and gluons in the Lund plane

Discriminating quark and gluon jets is a long-standing topic in collider phenomenology. In this paper, we address this question using the Lund jet plane substructure technique introduced in recent years. We present two complementary approaches: one where the quark/gluon likelihood ratio is computed analytically, to single-logarithmic accuracy, in perturbative QCD, and one where the Lund declusterings are used to train a neural network. For both approaches, we either consider only the primary Lund plane or the full clustering tree. The analytic and machine-learning discriminants are shown to be equivalent on a toy event sample resumming exactly leading collinear single logarithms, where the analytic calculation corresponds to the exact likelihood ratio. On a full Monte Carlo event sample, both approaches show a good discriminating power, with the machine-learning models usually being superior. We carry out a study in the asymptotic limit of large logarithm, allowing us to gain confidence that this superior performance comes from effects that are subleading in our analytic approach. We then compare our approach to other quark-gluon discriminants in the literature. Finally, we study the resilience of our quark-gluon discriminants against the details of the event sample and observe that the analytic and machine-learning approaches show similar behaviour.