Tagging Boosted Ws with Wavelets

Abstract

We present a new technique for distinguishing the hadronic decays of boosted heavy particles from QCD backgrounds based on wavelet transforms. As an initial exploration, we illustrate the technique in the particular case of hadronic $W$ boson decays, comparing it to the ``mass drop'' cut currently used by the LHC experiments. We apply wavelet cuts, which make use of complementary information, and in combination with the mass drop cut results in an improvement of $\sim$7% in discovery reach of hadronic $W$ boson final states over a wide range of transverse momenta.