Jet substructure at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

In this thesis, we use the CMS Open Data to study the 2-prong substructure of jets. We use CMS's particle flow reconstruction algorithm to obtain jet constituents, which we then use to perform various jet substructure studies. After validating our basic kinematics and substructure results through a comparison to results from parton shower generators, we extract the 2-prong substructure of the leading jet using the soft drop algorithm. We find good agreement between the results from the Open Data and those obtained from parton shower generators. For the 2-prong substructure, we also compare to analytic calculations performed to modified leading-logarithmic accuracy. To our best knowledge, this is the first ever physics analysis based on the CMS Open Data.