Additional Soft Jets in ${\rm t\bar{t}}$ Production at the Tevatron $\pp$ Collider

Abstract

A large fraction of top quark events in $\pp$ collisions at $1.8\ \TeV$ will contain additional soft hadronic jets from gluon bremsstrahlung off the quarks and gluons in the hard processes $\qq, gg \to \tt \to \bb \ww$. These extra jets can cause complications when attempting to reconstruct $m_t$ from the invariant mass of combinations of final-state quarks and leptons. We show how such soft radiation cannot be unambiguously associated with either initial-state radiation or or with final-state radiation off the $b$ quarks. The top quarks can radiate too, and in fact the pattern of radiation has a very rich structure, which depends on the orientation of the final-state particles with respect to each other and with respect to the beam. We calculate the full radiation pattern of soft jets in the soft gluon approximation and compare with several approximate forms which are characteristic of parton shower Monte Carlos. The implications for top mass measurements are discussed.