Telescoping Jets: Multiple Event Interpretations with Multiple R's

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method called Telescoping Jets that uses multiple interpretations of collider events by varying jet size parameter R, significantly enhancing statistical power in particle searches.

Contribution

It proposes a fast, simple approach to generate multiple event interpretations by varying jet size R, improving analysis sensitivity over traditional single-interpretation methods.

Findings

46% improvement in Higgs search significance at 8 TeV LHC

Method increases statistical power of collider analyses

Demonstrates effectiveness with ZH→ννbb channel

Abstract

Jets at high energy colliders are complicated objects to identify. Even if jets are widely separated, there is no reason for jets to have the same size. A single reconstruction, or interpretation, of each event can only extract a limited amount of information. Motivated by the recently proposed Qjet algorithms, which give multiple interpretations for each event using nondeterministic jet clustering, we propose a simple, fast and powerful method to give multiple event interpretations by varying the parameter R in the jet definition. With multiple interpretations we can redefine the weight of each event in a counting experiment to be the fraction of interpretations passing the experimental cuts, instead of 0 or 1 in a conventional analysis. We show that the statistical power of an analysis can be dramatically increased. In particular, we can have a 46% improvement in the statistical significance for the Higgs search with an associated Z boson (ZH\rightarrow \nu {\bar \nu}b {\bar b}) at the 8 TeV LHC.