On the Feasibility and Utility of ISR Tagging

Abstract

The production of new particles at a hadron collider like the LHC is always accompanied by QCD radiation attributable to the initial state (i.e. ISR). This tends to complicate analyses, so ISR is normally regarded as a nuisance. Nevertheless, we show that ISR can also be valuable, yielding information that can help in the discovery and interpretation of physics beyond the Standard Model. To access this information we will introduce new techniques designed to identify ISR jets on an event-by-event basis, a process we term ISR tagging. As a demonstration of their utility, we will apply these techniques to SUSY di-squark (di-gluino) production to show that they can be used to identify ISR jets in roughly 40% (15%) of the events, with a mistag rate of around 10% (15%). We then show that, through the application of a new method which we will introduce, knowledge of an ISR jet allows us to infer the squark (gluino) mass to within roughly 20% of its true value.