Physics Letters B 786 (2018) 106–113
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Safe jet vetoes
Silvia Pascoli, Richard Ruiz, Cedric Weiland
∗
Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, UK
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
6 June 2018
Received
in revised form 7 August 2018
Accepted
10 August 2018
Available
online 31 August 2018
Editor:
G.F. Giudice
Keywords:
Beyond
the Standard Model
Jet
veto
Collider
physics
Neutrino
physics
Central jet vetoes are powerful tools for reducing QCD background in measurements and searches for
electroweak and colorless, new physics processes in hadron collisions. In this letter, we report the
key findings of a new philosophy to designing searches for such phenomena at hadron colliders, one
designed and centered around a dynamical jet veto instead of a static veto applied independently of
other selection criteria. Specifically, we investigate the theoretical and phenomenological consequences
of setting the jet veto scale to the transverse momentum (p
T
) of the leading charged lepton in multi-
lepton
processes on an event-by-event basis. We consider the case of a TeV-scale heavy neutrino N
decaying
to the trilepton final state and find the following: (i) Perturbative uncertainties associated with
the veto greatly reduce due to tying the veto scale to the hard process scale. (ii) The signal efficiency
for passing the veto jumps to 95% and exhibits little-to-no dependence on the neutrino mass scale.
(iii) Top quark and “fake” lepton rejection capabilities also improve compared to only vetoing heavy
flavor-tagged jets above a fixed p
T
. This results in an increased sensitivity to active–sterile neutrino
mixing by approximately an order of magnitude over the LHC’s lifetime. For a Dirac neutrino with
mass m
N
= 150–1000 GeV and the representative active–sterile mixing hypothesis |V
e4
| =|V
τ 4
| with
|V
μ4
| = 0, we find that LHC experiments can probe |V
e4
|
2
, |V
τ 4
|
2
6 × 10
−4
–8 × 10
−3
, surpassing the
global upper limit for m
N
< 450 GeV, with L =3ab
−1
of data at
√
s =14 TeV. Due to the color structures
of the heavy N production mechanisms considered, we argue that our results hold broadly for other
color-singlet processes.
© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
Jet vetoes, i.e., the rejection of events with jets above a trans-
verse
momentum threshold (p
Veto
T
), are incredibly powerful tools
for reducing QCD backgrounds in measurements and searches for
electroweak (EW) and colorless new physics processes at hadron
colliders. In conjunction with heavy quark flavor-tagging, jet ve-
toes
are among the most widely used techniques by experiments
at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Theoretically,
however, jet vetoes are, simply put, complicated.
Foremost, select arguments of the Collinear Factorization Theo-
rem [1–4],
i.e., the master equation for computing hadronic scatter-
ing
rates, do not hold in the presence of a veto due to its exclusive
nature. More precisely, jet vetoes receive corrections from Glauber
exchanges, e.g., double parton scattering/multiple parton interac-
tions,
which are beyond the theorem’s formal accuracy nor are
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: silvia.pascoli@durham.ac.uk (S. Pascoli),
richard.ruiz@durham.ac.uk (R. Ruiz), cedric.weiland@durham.ac.uk (C. Weiland).
presently known to factorize; for further details, see Refs. [5,2–4,
6,7].
In addition, for color-singlet processes occurring at a mass
scale Q , vetoes give rise to logarithmic dependencies on p
Veto
T
of
the form α
s
(p
Veto
T
) log(Q
2
/p
Veto 2
T
). While usually perturbative in
practice, such contributions and uncertainties are sufficiently large
that high-accuracy resummation, either analytically [8–13]or by
parton showers means [14], is necessary to reproduce EW data.
Moreover, the effectiveness of vetoes in searches for new high-
mass
particles is considerably hindered by the higher predisposi-
tion
of higher mass objects to generate QCD radiation than lighter
objects [15,16].
In
this letter, we report on a particular jet veto implementation,
which we describe as a “safe jet veto,” that addresses the latter
two concerns. Specifically, for final states with multiple charged
leptons, pp → n + X, ∈{e, μ, τ }, we set on an event-by-event
basis the value of p
Veto
T
to be the p
T
of the leading (highest p
T
)
charged lepton. Dynamical jet vetoes, such as the one we propose,
have been considered previously in the context of EW boson pro-
duction [17–19],
but only for computational convenience. Here, we
demonstrate that they can be successfully used in a much broader
class of experimental searches, including searches for new, high-
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2018.08.060
0370-2693/
© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.