Gaining (mutual) information about quark/gluon discrimination
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Larkoski-2014-Gaining (mutual) inf.pdf
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Author(s)
Thaler, Jesse
Waalewijn, Wouter J.
Larkoski, Andrew
Date Issued
November 2014
Journal
Journal of High Energy Physics
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Larkoski, Andrew J., Jesse Thaler, and Wouter J. Waalewijn. “Gaining (mutual) Information About Quark/gluon Discrimination.” J. High Energ. Phys. 2014, no. 11 (November 2014).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Discriminating quark jets from gluon jets is an important but challenging problem in jet substructure. In this paper, we use the concept of mutual information to illuminate the physics of quark/gluon tagging. Ideal quark/gluon separation requires only one bit of truth information, so even if two discriminant variables are largely uncorrelated, they can still share the same “truth overlap”. Mutual information can be used to diagnose such situations, and thus determine which discriminant variables are redundant and which can be combined to improve performance. Using both parton showers and analytic resummation, we study a two-parameter family of generalized angularities, which includes familiar infrared and collinear (IRC) safe observables like thrust and broadening, as well as IRC unsafe variants like p [D over T] and hadron multiplicity. At leading-logarithmic (LL) order, the bulk of these variables exhibit Casimir scaling, such that their truth overlap is a universal function of the color factor ratio C [subscript A] [over C subscript F] . Only at next-to-leading-logarithmic (NLL) order can one see a difference in quark/gluon performance. For the IRC safe angularities, we show that the quark/gluon performance can be improved by combining angularities with complementary angular exponents. Interestingly, LL order, NLL order, Pythia 8, and Herwig++ all exhibit similar correlations between observables, but there are significant differences in the predicted quark/gluon discrimination power. For the IRC unsafe angularities, we show that the mutual information can be calculated analytically with the help of a nonperturbative “weighted-energy function”, providing evidence for the complementarity of safe and unsafe observables for quark/gluon discrimination.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Nuclear Science
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep11(2014)129
