Finding top quarks with shower deconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new jet tagging method using shower deconstruction to identify hadronically decaying top quarks, outperforming existing algorithms in discriminating top jets from QCD jets.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel shower deconstruction-based top jet tagging technique, enhancing the accuracy of identifying boosted top quarks in collider experiments.

Findings

Outperforms existing top jet tagging algorithms.

Uses a likelihood ratio approach for jet classification.

Effective in discriminating boosted top quark jets.

Abstract

We develop a new method for tagging jets produced by hadronically decaying top quarks. The method is an application of shower deconstruction, a maximum information approach that was previously applied to identifying jets produced by Higgs bosons that decay to bottom quarks. We tag an observed jet as a top jet based on a cut on a calculated variable that is an approximation to the ratio of the likelihood that a top jet would have the structure of the observed jet to the likelihood that a non-top QCD jet would have this structure. We find that the shower deconstruction based tagger can perform better in discriminating boosted top quark jets from QCD jets than other publicly available tagging algorithms.