The Structure of Jets at Hadron Colliders

Book excerpt: Jets are collimated, high energy streams of particles that are ubiquitous at hadron colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It has been recognized that jets are a feature of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD). QCD predicts an approximate scaling behavior at high energies. Due to the very high energies made available by the LHC, the decay products of heavy, unstable particles can also be collimated into a narrow cone and these are observed as jets by the LHC experiments. Recently, there has been significant interest in studying the substructure of jets with the goal of discriminating QCD jets from jets initiated by heavy particle decay. In this thesis, I will describe the modeling of jets in QCD as well as the pattern of radiation from heavy particles, such as the top quark. This will lead to a discussion of a correlation function on the constituents of a jet that is useful in understanding jet substructure. This correlation function encodes angular scaling properties of jets and its behavior in QCD will be studied.