Finding physics signals with shower deconstruction

Abstract

We introduce shower deconstruction, a method to look for new physics in a hadronic environment. The method aims to be a full information approach using small jets. It assigns to each event a number chi that is an estimate of the ratio of the probability for a signal process to produce that event to the probability for a background process to produce that event. The analytic functions we derive to calculate these probabilities mimic what full event generators like Pythia or Herwig do and can be depicted in a diagrammatic way. As an example, we apply this method to a boosted Higgs boson produced in association with a Z-boson and show that this method can be useful to discriminate this signal from the Z+jets background.

Comments: Revised version with improvements to the algorithm and a normalization error corrected. Performance is improved compared to version 1