arXiv subjects

Simone Marzani

Publications and source records attributed to Simone Marzani.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Higgs boson tagging with the Lund jet plane

We construct a procedure to separate boosted Higgs bosons decaying into hadrons, from the background due to strong interactions. We employ the Lund jet plane to obtain a theoretically well-motivated representation of the jets of interest and we use the resulting images as the input to a convolutional neural network classifier. In particular, we consider two different decay modes of the Higgs boson, namely into a pair of bottom quarks or into light jets, against the respective backgrounds. For each case, we consider both a moderate- and high- boost scenario. The performance of the tagger is compared to what is achieved using a traditional single-variable analysis which exploits a QCD inspired color-singlet tagger, namely the jet color ring observable.

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arXiv2021

Tagging the initial-state gluon

We study the production of an electroweak boson in association with jets, in processes where the jet with the highest transverse momentum is identified as quark-initiated. The quark/gluon tagging procedure is realised by a cut on a jet angularity and it is therefore theoretically well-defined and exhibits infrared and collinear safety. In this context, exploiting resummed perturbation theory, we are able to provide theoretical predictions for transverse momentum distributions at a well-defined and, in principle, systematically improvable accuracy. In particular, tagging the leading jet as quark-initiated allows us to enhance the initial-state gluon contribution. Thus, these novel transverse momentum distributions are potentially interesting observables to probe the gluonic degrees of freedom of the colliding protons.

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arXiv2021

Jet Angularities in Z+jet production at the LHC

We present a phenomenological study of angularities measured on the highest transverse-momentum jet in LHC events that feature the associate production of a $Z$ boson and one or more jets. In particular, we study angularity distributions that are measured on jets with and without the SoftDrop grooming procedure. We begin our analysis exploiting state-of-the-art Monte Carlo parton shower simulations and we quantitatively assess the impact of next-to-leading order (NLO) matching and merging procedures. We then move to analytic resummation and arrive at an all-order expression that features the resummation of large logarithms at next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy (NLL) and is matched to the exact NLO result. Our predictions include the effect of soft emissions at large angles, treated as a power expansion in the jet radius, and non-global logarithms. Furthermore, matching to fixed-order is performed in such a way to ensure what is usually referred to as NLL$'$ accuracy. Our results account for realistic experimental cuts and can be easily compared to upcoming measurements of jet angularities from the LHC collaborations.

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arXiv2020

Combining $Q_T$ and small-$x$ resummations

We analyze transverse momentum ($Q_T$) resummation of a colorless final state, e.g. Higgs production in gluon fusion or the production of a lepton pair via the Drell-Yan mechanism, in the limit where the invariant mass of the final state is much less then the center-of-mass energy, i.e. $Q^2\ll s$. We show how the traditional resummation of logarithms of $Q_T/Q$ can be supplemented with the resummation of the leading logarithmic contributions at small $x=Q^2/s$ and we compute the necessary ingredients to perform such joint resummation.

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arXiv2020

Towards Machine Learning Analytics for Jet Substructure

The past few years have seen a rapid development of machine-learning algorithms. While surely augmenting performance, these complex tools are often treated as black-boxes and may impair our understanding of the physical processes under study. The aim of this paper is to move a first step into the direction of applying expert-knowledge in particle physics to calculate the optimal decision function and test whether it is achieved by standard training, thus making the aforementioned black-box more transparent. In particular, we consider the binary classification problem of discriminating quark-initiated jets from gluon-initiated ones. We construct a new version of the widely used N-subjettiness, which features a simpler theoretical behaviour than the original one, while maintaining, if not exceeding, the discrimination power. We input these new observables to the simplest possible neural network, i.e. the one made by a single neuron, or perceptron, and we analytically study the network behaviour at leading logarithmic accuracy. We are able to determine under which circumstances the perceptron achieves optimal performance. We also compare our analytic findings to an actual implementation of a perceptron and to a more realistic neural network and find very good agreement.

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arXiv2020

An Optimal Observable for Color Singlet Identification

We present a novel approach to construct a color tagger, i.e. an observable that is able to discriminate the decay of a color-singlet into two jets from a two-jet background in a different color configuration. We do this by explicitly taking the ratio of the corresponding leading-order matrix elements in the soft limit, thus obtaining an observable that is provably optimal within our approximation. We call this observable the "jet color ring" and we compare its performance to other color-sensitive observables such as jet pull and dipolarity. We also assess the performance of the jet color ring in simulations by applying it to the case of the hadronic decays of a boosted Higgs boson and of an electroweak boson.

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arXiv2020

Safe Use of Jet Pull

Jet pull is an observable designed to probe colour flow between jets. Thus far, a particular projection of the pull vector, the pull angle, has been employed to distinguish colour flow between jets produced by a colour singlet or an octet decay. This is of particular importance in order to separate the decay of a Higgs boson to a pair of bottom quarks from the QCD background. However, the pull angle is not infra-red and collinear (IRC) safe. In this paper we introduce IRC safe projections of the pull vector that exhibit good sensitivity to colour flow, while maintaining calculability. We calculate these distributions to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, in the context of the hadronic decay of a Higgs boson, and compare these results to Monte Carlo simulations. This study allows us to define an IRC safe version of the pull angle in terms of asymmetry distributions. Furthermore, because of their sensitivity to wide-angle soft radiation, we anticipate that these asymmetries can play an important role in assessing subleading colour correlations and their modelling in general-purpose Monte Carlo parton showers.

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arXiv2019

Fitting the Strong Coupling Constant with Soft-Drop Thrust

Soft drop has been shown to reduce hadronisation effects at $e^+e^-$ colliders for the thrust event shape. In this context, we perform fits of the strong coupling constant for the soft-drop thrust distribution at NLO+NLL accuracy to pseudo data generated by the \textsf{Sherpa}~event generator. In particular, we focus on the impact of hadronisation corrections, which we estimate both with an analytical model and a Monte-Carlo based one, on the fitted value of $α_s(m_Z)$. We find that grooming can reduce the size of the shift in the fitted value of $α_s$ due to hadronisation. In addition, we also explore the possibility of extending the fitting range down to significantly lower values of (one minus) thrust. Here, soft drop is shown to play a crucial role, allowing us to maintain good fit qualities and stable values of the fitted strong coupling. The results of these studies show that soft-drop thrust is a promising candidate for fitting $α_s$ at $e^+ e^-$ colliders with reduced impact of hadronisation effects.

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arXiv2019

Soft-Drop Thrust

Soft drop, a technique originally developed in the context of jet physics in proton-proton collisions in order to reduce the contamination from non-perturbative effects, is applied to event shapes in electron-positron annihilation. In particular, we study the thrust distribution at the $Z$ pole and show that the region where non-perturbative corrections due to the hadronisation process are small is considerably extended if soft drop is applied. Therefore, we argue that the use of soft drop to reduce hadronisation effects is potentially of great benefit in the context of strong coupling determination using event shapes, which would be otherwise characterised by a strong correlation between $α_s$ and non-perturbative parameters. However, reduced sensitivity to hadronisation corrections is only one of the aspects that need to be considered. In this context, we show that perturbative calculability, especially away from the soft and collinear region of the event-shape spectrum, has a nontrivial interplay with the soft-drop observable of choice. To this purpose, besides thrust, we investigate the behaviour of the hemisphere mass as well as the jet mass. We find that the latter shows the most promising behaviour in the intermediate region of the spectrum, especially if small jet radii are considered.

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arXiv2019

Theory Predictions for the Pull Angle

Pull is a jet observable that is sensitive to color flow between dipoles. It has seen wide use for discrimination of particles with similar decay topologies but carrying different color representations and has been measured on W bosons from top quark decays by the D$\emptyset$ and ATLAS experiments. In this paper, we present the first theoretical predictions of pull, focusing on a color-singlet decaying in two jets. The pull angle observable is particularly sensitive to color flow, but is not infrared and collinear safe and so cannot be calculated in fixed-order perturbation theory. Nevertheless, all-orders resummation renders its distribution finite, a property referred to as Sudakov safety. In our prediction of the pull angle we also include an estimation of the effects from hadronization, and directly compare our results to simulation and experimental data.

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arXiv2018

Four-loop splitting functions at small $x$

We consider the expansion of small-$x$ resummed DGLAP splitting functions at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy to four-loop order, namely next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N$^3$LO). From this, we extract the exact LL and NLL small-$x$ contributions to the yet unknown N$^3$LO splitting functions, both in the standard $\overline{MS}$ scheme and in the $Q_0 \overline{MS}$ scheme usually considered in small-$x$ literature. We show that the impact of unknown subleading logarithmic contributions (NNLL and beyond) at N$^3$LO is significant, thus motivating future work towards their computation. Our results will be also needed in future to match NLL resummation to N$^3$LO evolution. In turn, we propose an improved implementation of the small-$x$ resummation and therefore release a new version of the resummation code (HELL 3.0) which contains these changes.

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arXiv2018

Double resummation for Higgs production

We present the first double-resummed prediction of the inclusive cross section for the main Higgs production channel in proton-proton collisions, namely gluon fusion. Our calculation incorporates to all orders in perturbation theory two distinct towers of logarithmic corrections which are enhanced, respectively, at threshold, i.e. large x, and in the high-energy limit, i.e. small x. Large-x logarithms are resummed to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, while small-x ones to leading logarithmic accuracy. The double-resummed cross section is furthermore matched to the state-of-the-art fixed-order prediction at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading accuracy. We find that double resummation corrects the Higgs production rate by 2% at the currently explored center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and its impact reaches 10% at future circular colliders at 100 TeV.

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arXiv2018

Parton distributions with small-x resummation: evidence for BFKL dynamics in HERA data

We present a determination of the parton distribution functions of the proton in which NLO and NNLO fixed-order calculations are supplemented by NLLx small-x resummation. Deep inelastic structure functions are computed consistently at NLO+NLLx or NNLO+NLLx, while for hadronic processes small-x resummation is included only in the PDF evolution, with kinematic cuts introduced to ensure the fitted data lie in a region where the fixed-order calculation of the hard cross-sections is reliable. In all other respects, the fits use the same methodology and are based on the same global dataset as the recent NNPDF3.1 analysis. We demonstrate that the inclusion of small-x resummation leads to a quantitative improvement in the perturbative description of the HERA inclusive and charm-production reduced cross-sections in the small x region. The impact of the resummation in our fits is greater at NNLO than at NLO, because fixed-order calculations have a perturbative instability at small x due to large logarithms that can be cured by resummation. We explore the phenomenological implications of PDF sets with small-x resummation for the longitudinal structure function $F_L$ at HERA, for parton luminosities and LHC benchmark cross-sections, for ultra-high energy neutrino-nucleus cross-sections, and for future high-energy lepton-proton colliders such as the LHeC.

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arXiv2017

Towards parton distribution functions with small-$x$ resummation: HELL 2.0

In global fits of parton distribution functions (PDFs) a large fraction of data points, mostly from the HERA collider, lies in a region of $x$ and $Q^2$ that is sensitive to small-$x$ logarithmic enhancements. Thus, the proper theoretical description of these data requires the inclusion of small-$x$ resummation. In this work we provide all the necessary ingredients to perform a PDF fit to deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) data which includes small-$x$ resummation in the evolution of PDFs and in the computation of DIS structure functions. To this purpose, not only we include the resummation of DIS massless structure functions, but we also consider the production of a massive final state (e.g. a charm quark), and the consistent resummation of mass collinear logarithms through the implementation of a variable flavour number scheme at small $x$. As a result, we perform the small-$x$ resummation of the matching conditions in PDF evolution at heavy flavour thresholds. The resummed results are accurate at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy and matched, for the first time, to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). Furthermore, we improve on our previous work by considering a novel all-order treatment of running coupling contributions. These results, which are implemented in a new release of HELL, version 2.0, will allow to fit PDFs from DIS data at the highest possible theoretical accuracy, NNLO+NLL, thus providing an important step forward towards precision determination of PDFs and consequently precision phenomenology at the LHC and beyond.

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arXiv2017

The jet mass distribution after Soft Drop

We present a first-principle computation of the mass distribution of jets which have undergone the grooming procedure known as Soft Drop. This calculation includes the resummation of the large logarithms of the jet mass over its transverse momentum, up to next-to-logarithmic accuracy, matched to exact fixed-order results at next-to-leading order. We also include non-perturbative corrections obtained from Monte-Carlo simulations and discuss analytic expressions for hadronisation and Underlying Event effects.

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arXiv2017

QCD resummation for hadronic final states

We review the basic concepts of all-order calculations in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and their application to collider phenomenology. We start by discussing the factorization properties of QCD amplitudes and cross-sections in the soft and collinear limits and their resulting all-order exponentiation. We then discuss several applications of this formalism to observables which are of great interest at particle colliders. In this context, we describe the all-order resummation of event-shape distributions, as well as observables that probe the internal structure of hadronic jets.

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arXiv2017

Jet Substructure Studies with CMS Open Data

We use public data from the CMS experiment to study the 2-prong substructure of jets. The CMS Open Data is based on 31.8/pb of 7 TeV proton-proton collisions recorded at the Large Hadron Collider in 2010, yielding a sample of 768,687 events containing a high-quality central jet with transverse momentum larger than 85 GeV. Using CMS's particle flow reconstruction algorithm to obtain jet constituents, we extract the 2-prong substructure of the leading jet using soft drop declustering. We find good agreement between results obtained from the CMS Open Data and those obtained from parton shower generators, and we also compare to analytic jet substructure calculations performed to modified leading-logarithmic accuracy. Although the 2010 CMS Open Data does not include simulated data to help estimate systematic uncertainties, we use track-only observables to validate these substructure studies.

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arXiv2017

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 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 2-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.

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