Exposing the QCD Splitting Function with CMS Open Data

The splitting function is a universal property of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which describes how energy is shared between partons. Despite its ubiquitous appearance in many QCD calculations, the splitting function cannot be measured directly, since it always appears multiplied by a collinear singu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Larkoski, Andrew, Marzani, Simone, Thaler, Jesse, Tripathee, Aashish, Xue, Wei
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111834
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2406-8160
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6809-7545
Description
Summary:The splitting function is a universal property of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which describes how energy is shared between partons. Despite its ubiquitous appearance in many QCD calculations, the splitting function cannot be measured directly, since it always appears multiplied by a collinear singularity factor. Recently, however, a new jet substructure observable was introduced which asymptotes to the splitting function for sufficiently high jet energies. This provides a way to expose the splitting function through jet substructure measurements at the Large Hadron Collider. In this Letter, we use public data released by the CMS experiment to study the two-prong substructure of jets and test the 1→2 splitting function of QCD. To our knowledge, this is the first ever physics analysis based on the CMS Open Data.