Investigating the Topology Dependence of Quark and Gluon Jets

Abstract: As most target final states for searches and measurements at the Large Hadron Collider have a particular quark/gluon composition, tools for distinguishing quark- from gluon-initiated jets can be very powerful. In addition to the difficulty of the classification task, quark-versus-gluon jet tagging is challenging to calibrate. The difficulty arises from the topology dependence of quark-versus-gluon jet tagging: since quarks and gluons have net quantum chromodynamic color charge while only colorless hadrons are measured, the radiation pattern inside a jet of a particular type depends on the rest of its environment. Given a definition of a quark or gluon jet, this paper studies the topology dependence of such jets in simulation. A set of phase space regions and jet substructure observables are identified for further comparative studies between generators and eventually in data.