Dichroic subjettiness ratios to distinguish colour flows in boosted boson tagging

Abstract

$N$-subjettiness ratios are in wide use for tagging heavy boosted objects, in particular the ratio of 2-subjettiness to 1-subjettiness for tagging boosted electroweak bosons. In this article we introduce a new, \emph{dichroic} ratio, which uses different regions of a jet to determine the two subjettiness measures, emphasising the hard substructure for the 1-subjettiness and the full colour radiation pattern for the 2-subjettiness. Relative to existing $N$-subjettiness ratios, the dichroic extension, combined with SoftDrop (pre-)grooming, makes it possible to increase the ultimate signal significance by about $25\%$ (for $2\,\text{TeV}$ jets), or to reduce non-perturbative effects by a factor of $2{-}3$ at $50\%$ signal efficiency while maintaining comparable background rejection. We motivate the dichroic approach through the study of Lund diagrams, supplemented with resummed analytical calculations.