The groomed and ungroomed jet mass distribution for inclusive jet production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework using SCET to accurately predict jet mass distributions in proton-proton collisions at the LHC, including both groomed and ungroomed jets, with next-to-leading logarithmic resummation.

Contribution

It establishes QCD factorization theorems for jet mass distributions with and without grooming, enabling joint resummation of multiple logarithms to improve predictive accuracy.

Findings

Good agreement with LHC data after non-perturbative corrections.

Resummation of logarithms in jet radius, mass, and grooming parameters.

Reliable normalization of groomed jet mass distributions.

Abstract

We study jet mass distributions measured in the single inclusive jet production in proton-proton collisions $pp\to \text{jet}+X$ at the LHC. We consider both standard ungroomed jets as well as soft drop groomed jets. Within the Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET), we establish QCD factorization theorems for both cases and we study their relation. The developed framework allows for the joint resummation of several classes of logarithmic corrections to all orders in the strong coupling constant. For the ungroomed case, we resum logarithms in the jet radius parameter and in the small jet mass. For the groomed case, we resum in addition the logarithms in the soft threshold parameter $z_{\text{cut}}$ which is introduced by the soft drop grooming algorithm. In this way, we are able to reliably determine the absolute normalization of the groomed jet mass distribution in proton-proton collisions. All logarithmic corrections are resummed to the next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We present numerical results and compare with the available data from the LHC. For both the groomed and ungroomed jet mass distributions we find very good agreement after including non-perturbative corrections.