Finding physics signals with shower deconstruction

TL;DR

Shower deconstruction is a novel method that uses small jets and probability ratios to enhance the detection of new physics signals, exemplified by boosted Higgs boson identification amidst background noise.

Contribution

The paper introduces shower deconstruction, a new analytical technique that mimics full event generators to improve signal-background discrimination in hadronic environments.

Findings

Effective discrimination of boosted Higgs from Z+jets background

Method mimics full event generators like Pythia or Herwig

Potential to enhance new physics searches in collider experiments

Abstract

We introduce shower deconstruction, a method to look for new physics in a hadronic environment. The method aims to be a full information approach using small jets. It assigns to each event a number chi that is an estimate of the ratio of the probability for a signal process to produce that event to the probability for a background process to produce that event. The analytic functions we derive to calculate these probabilities mimic what full event generators like Pythia or Herwig do and can be depicted in a diagrammatic way. As an example, we apply this method to a boosted Higgs boson produced in association with a Z-boson and show that this method can be useful to discriminate this signal from the Z+jets background.