We examine the robustness of collider phenomenology predictions for a dark sector scenario with QCD-like properties. Pair production of dark quarks at the LHC can result in a wide variety of signatures, depending on the details of the new physics model. A particularly challenging signal results when prompt production induces a parton shower that yields a high multiplicity of collimated dark hadrons with subsequent decays to Standard Model hadrons. The final states contain jets whose substructure encodes their non-QCD origin. This is a relatively subtle signature of strongly coupled beyond the Standard Model dynamics, and thus it is crucial that analyses incorporate systematic errors to account for the approximations that are being made when modeling the signal. We estimate theoretical uncertainties for a canonical substructure observable designed to be sensitive to the gauge structure of the underlying object, the two-point energy correlator $e_2^{(β)}$, by computing envelopes between resummed analytic distributions and numerical results from Pythia. We explore the separability against the QCD background as the confinement scale, number of colors, number of flavors, and dark quark masses are varied. Additionally, we investigate the uncertainties inherent to modeling dark sector hadronization. Simple estimates are provided that quantify one's ability to distinguish these dark sector jets from the overwhelming QCD background. Such a search would benefit from theory advances to improve the predictions, and the increase in statistics using the data to be collected at the high luminosity LHC.
Studies on jet substructure have evolved significantly in recent years. Jet substructure is essentially determined by QCD radiations and non-perturbative effects. Predictions of jet substructure are usually different among Monte Carlo event generators, and are governed by the parton shower algorithm implemented. For leading logarithmic parton shower, even though one of the core variables is the evolution variable, its choice is not unique. We examine evolution variable dependence of the jet substructure by developing a parton shower generator that interpolates between different evolution varia…
Hadrons have finite interaction size with dense material, a basic feature common to known forms of hadronic calorimeters (HCAL). We argue that substructure variables cannot use HCAL information to access the microscopic nature of jets much narrower than the hadronic shower size, which we call superboosted massive jets. It implies that roughly 15% of their transverse energy profile remains inaccessible due to the presence of long-lived neutral hadrons. This part of the jet substructure is also subject to order-one fluctuations. We demonstrate that the effects of the fluctuations are not reduced…
This paper proposes a new search program for dark sector parton showers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These signatures arise in theories characterized by strong dynamics in a hidden sector, such as Hidden Valley models. A dark parton shower can be composed of both invisible dark matter particles as well as dark sector states that decay to Standard Model particles via a portal. The focus here is on the specific case of 'semi-visible jets,' jet-like collider objects where the visible states in the shower are Standard Model hadrons. We present a Simplified Model-like parametrization for the…
We here present an extension of the CKKW-L multi-jet merging technique to so-called sector showers as implemented in the Vincia antenna shower. The bijective nature of sector showers allows for efficient multi-jet merging at high multiplicities, as any given configuration possesses only a single "history", while retaining the accuracy of the CKKW-L technique. Our method reduces the factorial scaling of the number of parton shower histories to a constant of a single history per colour-ordered final state. We show that the complexity of constructing shower histories is reduced to an effective li…
Semi-visible jets arise in strongly interacting dark sectors, where parton evolution includes dark sector emissions, resulting in jets overlapping with missing transverse momentum. The implementation of semi-visible jets is done using the Pythia Hidden valley module to duplicate the QCD sector showering. In this work, several jet substructure observables have been examined to compare semi-visible jets and light quark/gluon jets. These comparisons were performed using different dark hadron fraction in the semi-visible jets (signal). The extreme scenarios where signal consists either of entirely…
The phenomenology of dark sector is complicated if dark sector is charged under a confined hidden gauge group. In such kind of model, a dark parton produced at a high energy collider showers and hadronize to a cluster of dark mesons. Dark mesons then decay to visible particles and produce a jet-like signal, which is called "dark jet" in this work. Collider signal of dark jet depends on the property of dark mesons. For example, a finite lifetime of dark meson would provide displaced vertex or displaced track, thus one can use these displaced objects to tag dark jet. However if the lifetime of d…
Machine learning methods incorporating deep neural networks have been the subject of recent proposals for new hadronic resonance taggers. These methods require training on a dataset produced by an event generator where the true class labels are known. However, training a network on a specific event generator may bias the network towards learning features associated with the approximations to QCD used in that generator which are not present in real data. We therefore investigate the effects of variations in the modelling of the parton shower on the performance of deep neural network taggers usi…
As no evidence for classic WIMP-based signatures of dark matter have been found at the LHC, several phenomenological studies have raised the possibility of accessing a strongly-interacting dark sector through new collider-event topologies. If dark mesons exist, their evolution and hadronization procedure are currently little constrained. They could decay promptly and result in QCD-like jet structures, even though the original decaying particles are dark sector ones; they could behave as semi-visible jets; or they could behave as completely detector-stable hadrons, in which case the final state…
In conventional parton showers (including ones based on dipoles/antennae), a given $(\mathrm{Born}+m)$-parton configuration can typically be reached via ${\mathcal O}(m!)$ different "shower histories". In the context of matrix-element-correction and merging procedures, accounting for these histories mandates fairly complex and resource-intensive algorithms. A so far little-explored alternative in the shower context is to divide the branching phase spaces into distinct "sectors", each of which only receives contributions from a single branching kernel. This has a number of consequences includin…
Modification of the hard jet substructure in terms of the Soft Drop jet grooming algorithm observables is studied for three different scenarios of jet quenching in a quark-gluon plasma: i) an explicit enhancement of the parton splitting functions, ii) increased soft gluon emissions induced by an in-medium virtuality gain, and iii) energy loss due to a drag force. Despite the fact that first two scenarios both correspond to a radiative energy loss mechanism and lead to similar modifications of parton showers, they are shown to have very different impacts on the momentum balance of hard subjets.…
We outline a new technique for the fully-differential matching of final-state parton showers to NNLO calculations, focussing here on the simplest case of leptonic collisions with two final-state jets. The strategy is facilitated by working in the antenna formalism, making use of NNLO antenna subtraction on the fixed-order side and the sector-antenna framework on the shower side. As long as the combined real-virtual and double-real corrections do not overcompensate the real-emission term in the three-jet region, negative weights can be eliminated from the matching scheme. We describe the implem…
We consider dark sector scenarios where dark matter is accompanied by a dark photon and multiple-flavor dark fermions charged under the dark gauge group. We study quantum interference effects in dark sector jets, where multiple dark photons are emitted from high-energy dark fermions. We perform fully quantum simulations of dark sector showers and compare the results against those of the classical Monte-Carlo simulations. We find important differences in probability distributions of dark photon countings between quantum and classical computations. When the number of dark-fermion flavors is larg…
The last few years have seen community-wide excitement in the study of jet substructure derived from the inner workings of clustering algorithms. Such efforts have resulted in the design of new observables which are related to partonic processes from final state hadrons. Since jets are multi-scale objects, they necessarily encode information about both the perturbative (pQCD) parton shower and non-perturbative (npQCD) physics including hadronization. Recent high precision measurements of jet substructure in proton-proton (pp) collisions have pushed the theoretical community into extending thei…
We consider a theory with isotropic nonbirefringent Lorentz violation in the photon sector and explore the effects on the development of the electromagnetic component of extensive air showers in the Earth atmosphere. Specifically, we consider the case of a "fast" photon with a phase velocity larger than the maximum attainable velocity of a massive Dirac fermion (this case corresponds to a negative Lorentz-violating parameter $κ$ in the action). Shower photons with above-threshold energies decay promptly into electron-positron pairs, instead of decaying by the conventional production of electro…
The mass of heavy quarks, such as charm and bottom, plays an important role in the formation of parton showers. This effect is apparently not well understood when parton showers evolve in a strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma. We propose a new experimental measurement in relativistic heavy ion collisions, based on a two-prong subjet structure inside a reconstructed heavy flavor jet, which can place stringent constraints on the mass dependence of in-medium splitting functions. We identify the region of jet transverse momenta where parton mass effects are leading and predict a unique reversa…
Using a pQCD picture for jet evolution in a dense QCD medium, in which medium-induced parton branchings are factorized from vacuum-like emissions, we study two jet substructure observables: the $z_g$ and the Soft Drop multiplicity distributions. We compute the respective nuclear modification factors using a Monte-Carlo implementation of the parton showers. Our results are in qualitative agreement with LHC data for Pb+Pb collisions. We identify the physical mechanisms explaining our results: incoherent jet energy loss, semi-hard medium-induced emissions and the bias introduced by the steeply fa…
Cosmic rays have extremely high particle energies (up to $10^{20} \; \text{eV}$) and can be used to search for violations of Lorentz invariance. We consider isotropic nonbirefringent Lorentz violation in the photon sector for the case of a photon velocity larger than the maximum attainable velocity of the standard fermions. Up to now, Earth-based bounds on this type of Lorentz violation have been determined from observations of TeV gamma rays. Here, we elaborate on a novel approach to test Lorentz invariance with greatly improved sensitivity. This approach is based on investigating extensive a…
Cosmic ray atmospheric showers provide an effective environment for the production of MeV-scale dark sector particles. We show that, when available, the resonant annihilation of positrons from the shower on atmospheric electrons is the dominant production mechanism by more than an order of magnitude. We provide a quantitative example based on dark photon production and update existing constraints on a corresponding light dark matter model from kilotons neutrino experiments and xenon-based direct detection experiments.
We present a formalism for a fully coherent QED parton shower. The complete multipole structure of photonic radiation is incorporated in a single branching kernel. The regular on-shell 2 to 3 kinematic picture is kept intact by dividing the radiative phase space into sectors, allowing for a definition of the ordering variable that is similar to QCD antenna showers. A modified version of the Sudakov veto algorithm is discussed that increases performance at the cost of the introduction of weighted events. Due to the absence of a soft singularity, the formalism for photon splitting is very simila…
We use public data from the CMS experiment to study the 2-prong substructure of jets. The CMS Open Data is based on 31.8/pb of 7 TeV proton-proton collisions recorded at the Large Hadron Collider in 2010, yielding a sample of 768,687 events containing a high-quality central jet with transverse momentum larger than 85 GeV. Using CMS's particle flow reconstruction algorithm to obtain jet constituents, we extract the 2-prong substructure of the leading jet using soft drop declustering. We find good agreement between results obtained from the CMS Open Data and those obtained from parton shower gen…
We introduce soft drop isolation, a new photon isolation criterion inspired by jet substructure techniques. Soft drop isolation is collinear safe and is equivalent to Frixione isolation at leading non-trivial order in the small R limit. However, soft drop isolation has the interesting feature of being democratic, meaning that photons can be treated equivalently to hadrons for initial jet clustering. Taking advantage of this democratic property, we define an isolated photon subjet: a photon that is not isolated from its parent jet but is isolated within its parent subjet after soft drop declust…
Strongly interacting dark sectors predict novel LHC signatures such as semi-visible jets resulting from dark showers that contain both stable and unstable dark mesons. Distinguishing such semi-visible jets from large QCD backgrounds is difficult and constitutes an exciting challenge for jet classification. In this article we explore the potential of supervised deep neural networks to identify semi-visible jets. We show that dynamic graph convolutional neural networks operating on so-called particle clouds outperform convolutional neural networks analysing jet images as well as other neural net…
New jet observables are defined which characterize both fractal and scale-dependent contributions to the distribution of hadrons in a jet. These infrared safe observables, named Extended Fractal Observables (EFOs), have been applied to quark-gluon discrimination to demonstrate their potential utility. The EFOs are found to be individually discriminating and only weakly correlated to variables used in existing discriminators. Consequently, their inclusion improves discriminator performance, as here demonstrated with particle level simulation from the parton shower.
Deep inelastic scattering on nuclei at the Electron-Ion Collider will open new opportunities to investigate the structure of matter. Heavy flavor-tagged jets are complementary probes of the partonic composition and transport coefficients of large nuclei, but introduce a new mass scale that modifies the structure of parton showers and must be carefully accounted for in perturbative calculations. In the framework of soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluon interactions, we present the first calculation of inclusive charm-jet and bottom-jet cross sections in electron-nucleus collisions …
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 o…
We consider a twin WIMP scenario whose twin sector contains a full dark copy of the SM hadrons, where the lightest twin particles are twin pions. By analogy to the standard WIMP paradigm, the dark matter (DM) freezes out through twin electroweak interactions, and annihilates into a dark shower of light twin hadrons. These are either stable or decay predominantly to standard model (SM) photons. We show that this 'hadrosymmetric' scenario can be consistent with all applicable astrophysical, cosmological and collider constraints. In order to decay the twin hadrons before the big-bang nucleosynthe…
The jet quenching phenomenon in heavy ion collisions provides a strong evidence of the modification of parton shower in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Jet substructure observables can probe various aspects of the jet formation mechanism. They contain useful information about the QGP and allow us to study the medium properties in great details. Here we present theoretical calculations of jet shapes and cross sections in proton-proton and lead-lead collisions at the LHC using soft-collinear effective theory, with Glauber gluon interactions in the medium. We find that resumming large logarithms in…
We study the cosmology and LHC phenomenology of a consistent strongly interacting dark sector coupled to Standard Model particles through a generic vector mediator. We lay out the requirements for the model to be cosmologically viable, identify annihilations into dark vector mesons as the dominant dark matter freeze-out process and discuss bounds from direct detection. At the LHC the model predicts dark showers, which can give rise to semi-visible jets or displaced vertices. Existing searches for di-jet resonances and for missing energy mostly probe the parameter regions where prompt decays ar…
In these proceedings, we report on recent results related to vector boson-tagged jet production in heavy ion collisions and the related modification of jet substructure, such as jet shapes and jet momentum sharing distributions. $Z^0$-tagging and $γ$-tagging of jets provides new opportunities to study parton shower formation and propagation in the quark-gluon plasma and has been argued to provide tight constrains on the energy loss of reconstructed jets. We present theoretical predictions for isolated photon-tagged and electroweak boson-tagged jet production in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN…
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…
It was proposed recently that different chiralities of the dark matter (DM) fermion under a broken dark U(1) gauge group can lead to distinguishable signatures at the LHC through shower patterns, which may reveal the mass origin of the dark sector. We study this subject further by examining the dark shower of two simplified models, the dubbed Chiral Model and the Vector Model. We derive a more complete set of collinear splitting functions with power corrections, specifying the helicities of the initial DM fermion and including the contribution from an extra degree of freedom, the dark Higgs bo…
Vectorlike quarks have been shown to resolve certain long-standing discrepancies pertaining to the bottom sector. We investigate, here, the prospects of identifying the existence of a topless vectorlike doublet $(B,~Y)$, as is preferred by the electroweak precision measurements. Concentrating on single production, $viz.$ $B \bar b$ with $B \to b + Z/H$ subsequently, we find that the fully hadronic decay-channel is susceptible to discovery provided jet substructure observables are used. At the 13 TeV LHC with an integrated luminosity of 300 fb$^{-1}$, a modest value of the chromomagnetic transi…
In these proceedings, we discuss the role of heavy quark mass on the formation of parton showers. Mass effects are not well understood when parton branching occurs in nuclear matter, such as the quark-gluon plasma. Recently, a theoretically consistent picture of open heavy flavor production in ultra relativistic nuclear collisions has begun to emerge based on effective theories of QCD, such as soft collinear effective theory with Glauber gluons. We show that implementation of in-medium splitting processes containing heavy quarks into next-to-leading order calculations of heavy flavor productio…
