Theory Group Seminar, 28 March 2017
Dr. Jesse Thaler, MIT
Casimir meets Poisson
abstract
Quark/gluon discrimination is a key goal in jet substructure, with
numerous potential applications in LHC searches for physics beyond the
standard model. In order to make quark/gluon tagging a more robust tool,
one wants first-principles QCD calculations to predict the degree of
quark/gluon separation. To date, the best performing methods are based
on Poisson-like counting observables which are not calculable using
perturbation theory. Conversely, the most analytically tractable methods
are based on Casimir-scaling observables which do not yield the best
discrimination power. In this talk, I introduce a new quark/gluon
discriminant that bridges this gap, yielding both excellent tagging
performance and a high degree of analytic control.