Rapidity-Dependent Jet Vetoes

TL;DR

This work introduces rapidity-weighted jet veto variables that implement central-tight yet forward-loose restrictions, enabling improved control over jet activity in color-singlet processes. Using soft-collinear effective theory, the authors derive a factorized, resummed description of Higgs+0-jet production in the 0-jet bin and perform NLL'+NLO predictions, including nonsingular contributions and a detailed uncertainty analysis. They validate the approach by comparing a T_C^jet-based prediction to ATLAS H→γγ data, finding good agreement, and demonstrate the potential to test these vetoes in other SM processes such as Drell-Yan and diboson production. The results illustrate that rapidity-weighted jet vetoes offer a complementary and robust tool for jet binning and precision phenomenology at the LHC, with prospects for further refinement at NNLL'+NNLO.

Abstract

Jet vetoes are a prominent part of the signal selection in various analyses at the LHC. We discuss jet vetoes for which the transverse momentum of a jet is weighted by a smooth function of the jet rapidity. With a suitable choice of the rapidity-weighting function, such jet-veto variables can be factorized and resummed allowing for precise theory predictions. They thus provide a complementary way to divide phase space into exclusive jet bins. In particular, they provide a natural and theoretically clean way to implement a tight veto on central jets with the veto constraint getting looser for jets at increasingly forward rapidities. We mainly focus our discussion on the 0-jet case in color-singlet processes, using Higgs production through gluon fusion as a concrete example. For one of our jet-veto variables we compare the resummed theory prediction at NLL'+NLO with the recent differential cross section measurement by the ATLAS experiment in the $H\toγγ$ channel, finding good agreement. We also propose that these jet-veto variables can be measured and tested against theory predictions in other SM processes, such as Drell-Yan, diphoton, and weak diboson production.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Left: Illustration of rapidity weighting functions for $\mathcal{T}_{Bj}$ (orange), $\mathcal{T}_{Cj}$ (green), and $p_{Tj}$ (blue dashed). The blue dotted lines show a fixed cut on the jet rapidity. Right: Phase-space region in the $p_{Tj}-y_j$ plane selected by the different jet-veto variables. (Here we take $Y=0$, so $\mathcal{T}_{Bj}=\mathcal{T}_{B\mathrm{cm} j}$.)
• Figure 2: Comparison of the singular, nonsingular, and full NLO cross sections differential in $\mathcal{T}_f^\mathrm{jet}$ and integrated over all of $Y$. The left and middle plots show the magnitude of the differential cross sections for $\mathcal{T}_B^\mathrm{jet}$ and $\mathcal{T}_C^\mathrm{jet}$ on a logarithmic scale. The right plot shows the ratios of nonsingular and singular contributions to the full NLO cross section for both $\mathcal{T}_B^\mathrm{jet}$ and $\mathcal{T}_C^\mathrm{jet}$.
• Figure 3: Profile scale variations as described in the text. The left plot shows the collective variation of all scales by a factor of two, which is used to estimate the FO uncertainty. The middle and right plots shows the variations of the beam and soft scales used to estimate the resummation uncertainty.
• Figure 4: Cumulant NLL$^\prime$ resummed and NLO nonsingular cross sections as a function of $\mathcal{T}^\mathrm{cut}$. The two plots on the left show the comparison between the two variants of $\mathcal{T}_B$-type and $\mathcal{T}_C$-type veto cross sections, respectively. The plot on the right shows the comparison between the corresponding contributions to $\mathcal{T}_C$ and $\mathcal{T}_B$-veto cross sections. The resummation/FO scales in the cross sections displayed here are given by the central profiles defined in Sec. \ref{['subsec:scalevar']}.
• Figure 5: Differential distributions for $\mathcal{T}_{B(\mathrm{cm})}^\mathrm{jet}$ for the $\lvert Y\rvert\le 2$ (left), $2\le \lvert Y\rvert\le 3$ (middle), and $\lvert Y\rvert\ge 3$ bins (right) to be compared with the left panel in Fig. \ref{['fig:Singnonsing']}, where the cross sections have been integrated over the full $Y$ range.