Pileup subtraction for jet shapes

Abstract

Jets in high energy hadronic collisions often contain the fingerprints of the particles that produced them. Those fingerprints, and thus the nature of the particles that produced the jets, can be read off with the help of quantities known as jet shapes. Jet shapes are, however, severely affected by pileup, the accumulation in the detector of the residues of the many simultaneous collisions taking place in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We introduce a method to correct for pileup effects in jet shapes. Relative to earlier, limited approaches, the key advance resides in its full generality, achieved through a numerical determination, for each jet, of a given shape's susceptibility to pileup. The method rescues the possibility of using jet shapes in the high pileup environment of current and future LHC running, as we show with examples of quark-gluon discrimination and top tagging.