Quark-Gluon tagging with Shower Deconstruction: Unearthing dark matter and Higgs couplings

Abstract: The separation of quark and gluon initiated jets can be an important way to improve the sensitivity in searches for new physics or in measurements of Higgs boson properties. We present a simplified version of the shower deconstruction approach as a novel observable for quark-gluon tagging. Assuming topocluster-like objects as input, we compare our observable with energy correlation functions and find a favorable performance for a large variety of jet definitions. When applied to dark matter searches in mono-jet final states limitations from small signal-to-background ratios can be overcome. We also show that quark-gluon tagging is an alternative way of separating weak boson from gluon-fusion production in the process p + p -> H + jet + jet + X