Telescoping Jets: Multiple Event Interpretations with Multiple R's

Abstract

Jets at high energy colliders are complicated objects to identify. Even if jets are widely separated, there is no reason for jets to have the same size. A single reconstruction, or interpretation, of each event can only extract a limited amount of information. Motivated by the recently proposed Qjet algorithms, which give multiple interpretations for each event using nondeterministic jet clustering, we propose a simple, fast and powerful method to give multiple event interpretations by varying the parameter R in the jet definition. With multiple interpretations we can redefine the weight of each event in a counting experiment to be the fraction of interpretations passing the experimental cuts, instead of 0 or 1 in a conventional analysis. We show that the statistical power of an analysis can be dramatically increased. In particular, we can have a 46% improvement in the statistical significance for the Higgs search with an associated Z boson (ZH\rightarrow \nu {\bar \nu}b {\bar b}) at the 8 TeV LHC.