A method is introduced for distinguishing top jets (boosted, hadronically decaying top quarks) from light quark and gluon jets using jet substructure. The procedure involves parsing the jet cluster to resolve its subjets, and then imposing kinematic constraints. With this method, light quark or gluon jets with pT ~ 1 TeV can be rejected with an efficiency of around 99% while retaining up to 40% of top jets. This reduces the dijet background to heavy t-tbar resonances by a factor of ~10,000, thereby allowing resonance searches in t-tbar to be extended into the all-hadronic channel. In addition, top-tagging can be used in t-tbar events when one of the tops decays semi-leptonically, in events with missing energy, and in studies of b-tagging efficiency at high pT.
We study techniques for identifying highly boosted top jets, where the subsequent top decay products are not isolated. For hadronic boosted tops, we consider variables which probe the jet substructure in order to reduce the background from QCD jets with large invariant mass. Substructure variables related to two-body kinematics are least sensitive to the modeling of parton shower, while those which involve multi-body kinematics may still have discrimination power. For leptonic boosted tops, we consider variables which characterize the separation between the lepton--although not isolated by con…
We propose a new technique for measuring the polarization of hadronically decaying boosted top quarks. In particular, we apply a subjet-based technique to events where the decay products of the top are clustered within a single jet. The technique requires neither b-tagging nor W-reconstruction, and does not rely on assumptions about either the top production mechanism or the sources of missing energy in the event. We include results for various new physics scenarios made with different Monte Carlo generators to demonstrate the robustness of the technique.
Top taggers which identify and reconstruct boosted top quarks have been established as novel tools for a multitude of LHC analyses. We show how single top production in association with a light-flavor or bottom jet can be observed in the boosted phase space regime. The full top reconstruction as part of the tagging algorithm allows us to define a distinctive kinematic angle which clearly separates different single top production processes.
We briefly review common tools and methods to identify boosted, hadronically decaying top quarks at the LHC experiments. This includes generic jet substructure variables, specific top identification algorithms, and recent developments in deep learning techniques.
We present a procedure for tagging boosted semi-leptonic $t\bar t$ events based on the Template Overlap Method. We introduce a new formulation of the template overlap function for leptonically decaying boosted tops and show that it can be used to compensate for the loss of background rejection due to reduction of b-tagging efficiency at high $p_T$. A study of asymmetric top pair production due to higher order effects shows that our approach improves the resolution of the truth level kinematic distributions. We show that the hadronic top overlap is weakly susceptible to pileup up to 50 interact…
Top partner searches are one of the key aspects of new physics analyses at the LHC. We correct an earlier statement that supersymmetric top searches based on decays to semileptonic tops are not promising. Reconstructing the direction of the boosted leptonic top quark and correlating it with the measured missing transverse energy vector allows us to reduce the top pair background to an easily manageable level. In addition, reconstructing the full momentum of the leptonic top quark determines the stop mass based on an M_{T2} endpoint.
We study jet substructures of a boosted polarized top quark, which undergoes the hadronic decay $t\to b u\bar d$, in the perturbative QCD framework, focusing on the energy profile and the differential energy profile. These substructures are factorized into the convolution of a hard top-quark decay kernel with a bottom-quark jet function and a $W$-boson jet function, where the latter is further factorized into the convolution of a hard $W$-boson decay kernel with two light-quark jet functions. Computing the hard kernels to leading order in QCD and including the resummation effect in the jet fun…
Machine learning techniques are used for treating jets as images to explore the performance of boosted top quark tagging. Tagging performances are studied in both hadronic and leptonic channels of top quark decay, employing a convolutional neural network (CNN) based technique along with boosted decision trees (BDT). This computer vision approach is also applied to distinguish between left and right polarized top quarks. In this context, an experimentally measurable asymmetry variable is proposed to estimate the polarization. Results indicate that the CNN based classifier is more sensitive to t…
$N$-subjettiness ratios are in wide use for tagging heavy boosted objects, in particular the ratio of 2-subjettiness to 1-subjettiness for tagging boosted electroweak bosons. In this article we introduce a new, \emph{dichroic} ratio, which uses different regions of a jet to determine the two subjettiness measures, emphasising the hard substructure for the 1-subjettiness and the full colour radiation pattern for the 2-subjettiness. Relative to existing $N$-subjettiness ratios, the dichroic extension, combined with SoftDrop (pre-)grooming, makes it possible to increase the ultimate signal signif…
We investigate the discovery potential of singly produced top-philic resonances at the high luminosity (HL) LHC in the four-top final state. Our analysis spans over the fully-hadronic, semi-leptonic, and same-sign dilepton channels where we present concrete search strategies adequate to a boosted kinematic regime and high jet-multiplicity environments. We utilize the Template Overlap Method (TOM) with newly developed template observables for tagging boosted top quarks, a large-radius jet variable $M_J$ and customized b-tagging tactics for background discrimination. Our results show that the sa…
The hierarchy problem can by addressed by extending the four-dimensional space-time to include an extra compact spatial dimension with non-trivial "warped" metric, as first suggested by Randall and Sundrum. If the Randall-Sundrum framework is realized in string theory, and if the Standard Model particles propagate in the extra dimension, Regge excitations of the Standard Model states should appear around the TeV scale. In a previous publication, we proposed a field-theoretic framework to model the tensor (spin-2) Regge partner of the gluon. Here, we use this framework to study the collider phe…
We investigate existing and future hadron-collider constraints on the top dipole chromomagnetic and chromoelectric moments, two quantities that are expected to be modified in the presence of new physics. We focus first on recent measurements of the inclusive top pair production cross section at the Tevatron and at the Large Hadron Collider. We then analyse the role of top-antitop events produced at very large invariant masses, in the context of the forthcoming 13-14 TeV runs of the LHC, and at a future 100 TeV proton-proton collider. In this latter case, the selection of semileptonic decays to…
Naturalness considerations, together with the non-observation of superpartners of the Standard Model particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) so far, favor supersymmetric (SUSY) models in which third generation squarks are significantly lighter than those of the first two generations. In such models, gluino pair-production is typically the dominant SUSY production process at the LHC, and it often leads to final states with multiple top quarks. Some of these top quarks may be relativistic in the lab frame, in which case their hadronic decays may produce "top jets". We propose that the recen…
We present a new technique for tagging heavy-flavor jets with p_T > 500 GeV called "mu_x tagging." Current track-based methods of b-jet tagging lose efficiency and experience a large rise in fake rate in the boosted regime. Using muons from B hadron decay, we combine angular information and jet substructure to tag b jets, c jets, light jets, and "light-heavy" jets (those containing B hadrons from gluon splitting). We find tagging efficiencies of epsilon_b = 14%, epsilon_c = 6.5%, epsilon_{light-light} = 0.14%, and epsilon_{light-heavy} = 0.5%, respectively, that are nearly independent of trans…
I present a new scheme for tagging boosted heavy flavor jets called "$μ_x$ tagging" and its application to TeV-scale physics beyond the Standard Model. Using muons from B hadron decay to define a particular combination "x" of angular information, and jet substructure variables, we identify a clean ($ε_{\mathrm{fake}}/ε_b\sim 1/100$) good efficiency ($ε_b = 14\%$) tag. I demonstrate the usefulness of this new scheme by showing the reach for discovery of leptophobic $Z^\prime\to b\bar b$ and $tH^\pm\to t t b$.
Cross sections for top quarks provide very interesting physics opportunities, being both sensitive to new physics and also perturbatively tractable due to the large top quark mass. Rigorous factorization theorems for top cross sections can be derived in several kinematic scenarios, including the boosted regime in the peak region that we consider here. In the context of the corresponding factorization theorem for $e^+e^-$ collisions we extract the last missing ingredient that is needed to evaluate the cross section differential in the jet-mass at two-loop order, namely the matching coefficient …
We present a new technique for distinguishing the hadronic decays of boosted heavy particles from QCD backgrounds based on wavelet transforms. As an initial exploration, we illustrate the technique in the particular case of hadronic $W$ boson decays, comparing it to the ``mass drop'' cut currently used by the LHC experiments. We apply wavelet cuts, which make use of complementary information, and in combination with the mass drop cut results in an improvement of $\sim$7% in discovery reach of hadronic $W$ boson final states over a wide range of transverse momenta.
At the LHC, a TeV-scale leptoquark (LQ) that decays dominantly to a top quark ($t$) and a light charged lepton ($\ell=e,μ$) would form a resonance system of \emph{boosted-$t$ $+$ high-$p_{\rm T}$-$\ell$}. We consider all possible vector LQ models within the Buchmüller-Rückl-Wyler classifications with the desired decay. We propose simple phenomenological Lagrangians that are suitable for bottom-up/experimental studies and, at the same time, can cover the relevant parameter spaces of these models. In this simplified framework, we study the pair and single production channels of vector LQs at the…
We initiate the study of the time substructure of jets, motivated by the fact that the next generation of detectors at particle colliders will resolve the time scale over which jet constituents arrive. This effect is directly related to hadronization, which transforms partons into massive hadrons with a distribution of velocities. We review the basic predictions for the velocity distribution of jet hadrons, and suggest an application for this information in the context of boosted object tagging. By noting that the velocity distribution is determined by the properties of the color string which …
We study a class of realizations of the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model that is motivated by dark matter and Higgs data, and in which the lightest pseudoscalar Higgs boson mass is smaller than twice the bottom quark mass and greater than twice the tau lepton mass. In such scenarios, the lightest pseudoscalar Higgs boson can be copiously produced at the LHC from the decay of heavier superpartners and will dominantly further decay into a pair of tau leptons that is generally boosted. We make use of a boosted object tagging technique designed to tag such a ditau jet, and estimate th…
The impact of event colour structure on the performance of the Johns-Hopkins, CMS, HEPToptagger and N-Subjettiness algorithms is investigated by studying colour singlet and colour octet resonances decaying to top-quark pairs. Large differences in top-tagging efficiency are observed due to the different colour charge of each resonance. These differences are quantified as a function of the algorithm parameters, the jet size parameter and the probability to misidentify light quarks and gluons as top candidates. We suggest that future experimental searches would benefit from optimising the choice …
At the LHC combinatorics make it unlikely that we will be able to observe stop pair production with a decay to a semi-leptonic top pair and missing energy for generic supersymmetric mass spectra. Using a Standard-Model top tagger on fully hadronic top decays we can not only extract the stop signal but also measure the top momentum. To illustrate the promise of tagging tops with moderate boost we include a detailed discussion of our HEPTopTagger algorithm.
The LHC search strategies for leptoquarks that couple dominantly to a top quark are different than for the ones that couple mostly to the light quarks. We consider charge $1/3$ ($ϕ_1$) and $5/3$ ($ϕ_5$) scalar leptoquarks that can decay to a top quark and a charged lepton ($t\ell$) giving rise to a resonance system of a boosted top and a high-$p_{\rm T}$ lepton. We introduce simple phenomenological models suitable for bottom-up studies and explicitly map them to all possible scalar leptoquark models within the Buchmüller-Rückl-Wyler classifications that can have the desired decays. We study pa…
We study the boosted Higgs tagging using the Lund jet plane. The convolutional neural network is used for the Lund images data set to classify hadronically decaying Higgs from the QCD background. We consider $H\to b \bar{b}$ and $H \to gg$ decay for moderate and high Higgs transverse momentum and compare the performance with the cut based approach using the jet color ring observable. The approach using Lund plane images provides good tagging efficiency for all the cases.
We demonstrate that the classification of boosted, hadronically-decaying weak gauge bosons can be significantly improved over traditional cut-based and BDT-based methods using deep learning and the jet charge variable. We construct binary taggers for $W^+$ vs. $W^-$ and $Z$ vs. $W$ discrimination, as well as an overall ternary classifier for $W^+$/$W^-$/$Z$ discrimination. Besides a simple convolutional neural network (CNN), we also explore a composite of two CNNs, with different numbers of layers in the jet $p_{T}$ and jet charge channels. We find that this novel structure boosts the performa…
A method is proposed for distinguishing highly boosted hadronically decaying W's (W-jets) from QCD-jets using jet substructure. Previous methods, such as the filtering/mass-drop method, can give a factor of ~2 improvement in S/sqrt(B) for jet pT > 200 GeV. In contrast, a multivariate approach including new discriminants such as R-cores, which characterize the shape of the W-jet, subjet planar flow, and grooming-sensitivities is shown to provide a much larger factor of ~5 improvement in S/sqrt(B). For longitudinally polarized W's, such as those coming from many new physics models, the discrimin…
For highly energetic top quarks, the products of the decay t->bqq' are collimated. The 3-prong decay structure can no longer be resolved using calorimeter information alone if the particle jet separation approaches the calorimeter granularity. We propose a new method, the HPTTopTagger, that uses tracks of charged particles inside a fat jet to find top quarks with transverse momentum pT >1 TeV. The tracking information is complemented by the calorimeter measurement of the fat jet energy to eliminate the sensitivity to jet-to-jet fluctuations in the charged-to-neutral particle ratio. We show tha…
We propose a new search strategy for quark partners which decay into a boosted Higgs and a light quark. As an example, we consider phenomenologically viable right handed up-type quark partners of mass $\sim 1$ TeV in composite pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone-boson Higgs models within the context of flavorful naturalness. Our results show that $S/B > 1$ and signal significance of $\sim 7σ$ is achievable at $\sqrt{s} = 14$ TeV LHC with 35 $fb^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity, sufficient to claim discovery of a new particle. A combination of a multi-dimensional boosted Higgs tagging technique, kinematics of…
Top tagging is a recent approach to identifying boosted hadronic top quarks. It avoids reconstructing individual top decay products and instead uses a jet algorithm to reconstruct the entire top decay. Quite generally, geometrically large jets including heavy particles (fat jets) can be analyzed on the level of their subjet constituents. LHC data will soon allow us to establish this new analysis method. We discuss different tagging algorithms, their critical QCD aspects, and currently available experimental results. For the development of taggers and their different applications this review sh…
We apply computer vision with deep learning -- in the form of a convolutional neural network (CNN) -- to build a highly effective boosted top tagger. Previous work (the "DeepTop" tagger of Kasieczka et al) has shown that a CNN-based top tagger can achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art conventional top taggers based on high-level inputs. Here, we introduce a number of improvements to the DeepTop tagger, including architecture, training, image preprocessing, sample size and color pixels. Our final CNN top tagger outperforms BDTs based on high-level inputs by a factor of $\sim 2$--3 …
Jet identification tools are crucial for new physics searches at the LHC and at future colliders. We introduce the concept of Mass Unspecific Supervised Tagging (MUST) which relies on considering both jet mass and transverse momentum varying over wide ranges as input variables - together with jet substructure observables - of a multivariate tool. This approach not only provides a single efficient tagger for arbitrary ranges of jet mass and transverse momentum, but also an optimal solution for the mass correlation problem inherent to current taggers. By training neural networks, we build MUST-i…
Many searches for physics beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) rely on top tagging algorithms, which discriminate between boosted hadronic top quarks and the much more common jets initiated by light quarks and gluons. We note that the hadronic calorimeter (HCAL) effectively takes a "digital image" of each jet, with pixel intensities given by energy deposits in individual HCAL cells. Viewed in this way, top tagging becomes a canonical pattern recognition problem. With this motivation, we present a novel top tagging algorithm based on an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), o…
We introduce a new jet shape -- N-subjettiness -- designed to identify boosted hadronically-decaying objects like electroweak bosons and top quarks. Combined with a jet invariant mass cut, N-subjettiness is an effective discriminating variable for tagging boosted objects and rejecting the background of QCD jets with large invariant mass. In efficiency studies of boosted W bosons and top quarks, we find tagging efficiencies of 30% are achievable with fake rates of 1%. We also consider the discovery potential for new heavy resonances that decay to pairs of boosted objects, and find significant i…
We introduce a new and highly efficient tagger for hadronically decaying top quarks, based on a deep neural network working with Lorentz vectors and the Minkowski metric. With its novel machine learning setup and architecture it allows us to identify boosted top quarks not only from calorimeter towers, but also including tracking information. We show how the performance of our tagger compares with QCD-inspired and image-recognition approaches and find that it significantly increases the performance for strongly boosted top quarks.
Studies of highly-boosted top quarks produced inclusively in pp collisions at 14 TeV are discussed. The hadronic decays of boosted top quarks was studied in a data-driven approach by analysing shapes of jet-mass distributions. Using Monte Carlo models after a fast detector simulation, it is shown that inclusive production of boosted top quarks can be observed if it has a cross section at least twice larger than the prediction from the approximate next-to-next-to-leading-order (aNNLO) calculation for the ttbar process. The ttbar process with the nominal aNNLO strength can be measured using the …
At the LHC, a generic supersymmetric cascade can be a source of top quark. Specifically third generation squarks and gluino are the major sources of top quark which could also be boosted. In this article, we have shown that jet substructure algorithm can be very useful in identifying such boosted top quarks in the cascade. We take inclusive three jets plus zero lepton plus missing energy final state and try to reconstruct at least one hadronically decaying top quark by using top tagging techniques which has good prospect at the LHC.
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 $t\to bW$ and $W\to f\bar{f'}$ 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 asymmet…
New TeV-scale physics processes at the LHC can produce Higgs bosons with substantive transverse Lorentz boost, such that the Higgs's decay products are nominally contained in a single jet. In the case of a light Higgs decaying predominantly to bb, previous studies have shown that these Higgs-jets can be identified by capitalizing on jet substructure techniques. In this work, we explore the possibility of also utilizing the subdominant but very distinctive decay h -> tau tau. To this end, we introduce the concept of a ``ditau-jet,'' or a jet consisting of two semi-collinear taus where one or bo…
We evaluate the phenomenological applicability of the dynamical grooming technique, introduced in [1], to boosted W and top tagging at LHC conditions. An extension of our method intended for multi-prong decays with an internal mass scale, such as the top quark decay, is presented. First, we tackle the reconstruction of the mass distribution of W and top jets quantifying the smearing due to pileup. When compared to state-of-the-art grooming algorithms like SoftDrop and its recursive version, dynamical grooming shows an enhanced resilience to background fluctuations. In addition, we asses the di…
Studies of the boosted sector in top-quark physics have known a fast-growing development with the arrival of high-energy data at LHC. This short review summarizes the current status of the boosted top-tagging techniques in ATLAS and CMS and presents an overview of some of the most noticeable developments.
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Multivariate techniques based on engineered features have found wide adoption in the identification of jets resulting from hadronic top decays at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Recent Deep Learning developments in this area include the treatment of the calorimeter activation as an image or supplying a list of jet constituent momenta to a fully connected network. This latter approach lends itself well to the use of Recurrent Neural Networks. In this work the applicability of architectures incorporating Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks is explored. Several network architectures, methods …
Measuring top polarization is extremely important in understanding any new physics that couples to top quark. Here, we take up the task of extracting polarization of top quark coming from TeV-scale stop decay at the upgraded high luminosity and high energy LHC. We focus on the scenario where the two tops from the stop decay lead to semi-leptonic final state. We take into account all relevant backgrounds and put kinematical cuts to suppress them. We arrive at a signal region where the desired signal can be observed with reasonable significance. Next, we examine, in such signal regions, how well…
We show that the tracking system in a collider detector can be used to efficiently identify boosted massive particles from their QCD backgrounds. We examine variables defined with tracking information which are sensitive to jet radiation patterns, including charged particle multiplicity and N-subjettiness. These variables are barely correlated with variables sensitive to the hard splitting scale in the jet, such as the filtered jet mass. Therefore these two kinds of variables should be combined to optimize the discriminating power. We illustrate the method with $W$ jet tagging. It is shown tha…
Korea University（高丽大学）；Korea Institute for Advanced Study（韩国高等研究院）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Neural network-based algorithms provide a promising approach to jet classification problems, such as boosted top jet tagging. To date, NN-based top taggers demonstrated excellent performance in Monte Carlo studies. In this paper, we construct a top-jet tagger based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and apply it to parton-level boosted top samples, with and without an additional gluon in the final state. We show that the jet observable defined by the CNN obeys the canonical definition of infrared safety: it is unaffected by the presence of the extra gluon, as long as it is soft or collin…
In view of the fact that the $n = 1$ Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes in a model with a Universal Extra Dimension (UED), could mimic supersymmetry signatures at the LHC, it is necessary to look for the $n = 2$ KK modes, which have no analogues in supersymmetry. We discuss the possibility of searching for heavy $n = 2$ vector boson resonances -- especially the $g_2$ -- through their decays to a highly-boosted top quark-antiquark pair using recently-developed top-jet tagging techniques in the hadronic channel. It is shown that $t\bar{t}$ signals from the $n = 2$ gluon resonance are as efficient a discove…
We construct a procedure to separate boosted Higgs bosons decaying into hadrons, from the background due to strong interactions. We employ the Lund jet plane to obtain a theoretically well-motivated representation of the jets of interest and we use the resulting images as the input to a convolutional neural network classifier. In particular, we consider two different decay modes of the Higgs boson, namely into a pair of bottom quarks or into light jets, against the respective backgrounds. For each case, we consider both a moderate- and high- boost scenario. The performance of the tagger is com…
Final states with four tops appear in various extensions of the Standard Model. Alas, top reconstruction faces combinatorial issues as they show up as large multiplicity events. In this paper, we present a new procedure to determine whether new physics is in fact due to a new source for tops. We establish the use of this procedure to separate the signal from background (primarily $t\bar{t}$+jets). Our analysis is model independent, in that it does not use any details of the four top production (such as possible missing energy), and does not require b-tagging.
Top polarization is an important probe of new physics that couples to the top sector, and which may be discovered at the 14 TeV LHC. Taking the example of the MSSM, we argue that top polarization measurements can put a constraint on the soft supersymmetry breaking parameter A_t. In light of the recent discovery of a Higgs-like boson of mass ~125 GeV, a large A_t is a prediction of many supersymmetric models. To this end, we develop a *detector level* analysis methodology for extracting polarization information from hadronic tops using boosted jet substructure. We show that with 100 fb^(-1) of …
