Jet Cleansing: Pileup Removal at High Luminosity

Abstract

One of the greatest impediments to extracting useful information from high luminosity hadron-collider data is radiation from secondary collisions (i.e. pileup) which can overlap with that of the primary interaction. In this paper we introduce a simple jet-substructure technique termed cleansing which can consistently correct for large amounts of pileup in an observable independent way. Cleansing works at the subjet level, combining tracker and calorimeter-based data to reconstruct the pileup-free primary interaction. The technique can be used on its own, with various degrees of sophistication, or in concert with jet grooming. We apply cleansing to both kinematic and jet shape reconstruction, finding in all cases a marked improvement over previous methods both in the correlation of the cleansed data with uncontaminated results and in measures like S/rt(B). Cleansing should improve the sensitivity of new-physics searches at high luminosity and could also aid in the comparison of precision QCD calculations to collider data.