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CMS-PAS-SMP-25-008
Evidence of the dead-cone effect in bottom quark initiated jets
Abstract: The suppression of collinear gluon emissions from a massive quark, or the ``dead-cone effect,'' is the primary manifestation of quark mass effects in parton showers. A differential measurement is presented of the emission density of bottom quarks, studied as a function of the angular separation between the emissions from the same emitter. The measurement is performed in bottom quark initiated jets originating from top quark and antiquark production with transverse momenta between 40 and 200 GeV. A proton-proton collision dataset recorded by the CMS experiment at $ \sqrt{s}= $ 13 TeV with an integrated luminosity of $ {59.8 \text{fb}^{-1}} $ is analyzed. The measurement, corrected for detector effects, is compared to several simulation programs revealing that a parton shower model without the dead-cone effect is strongly disfavored by the data.
Figures & Tables Summary References CMS Publications
Figures

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Figure 1:
An illustration of the iterative declustering of a b quark jet to construct the Lund Jet Plane (LJP). The upper diagram shows the showering of a b quark (pointing arrow) ordered in descending angular separation between the b quark and the gluon radiation (curly line). The pink cones along the direction of the emitters represent the dead cone, where collinear radiation is suppressed. The lower diagram shows the corresponding LJP, where each colored point corresponds to a declustering step in the upper diagram and the pink block indicates the region where emissions are suppressed by the dead-cone effect.

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Figure 2:
(Upper) Ratio of the emission density distribution between the b quark jets selected using either the DEEPJET b tagger or the T&P method to the b quark jets selected using generator-level information. (Lower) The detector-level and generator-level emission density distribution for b quark jets with 40 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 80 GeV in the POWHEG +PYTHIA\ $ \mathrm{t} \overline{\mathrm{t}} $ sample is shown with and without the partial b hadron reconstruction, either with generator-level information or with the transformer encoder. The statistical uncertainties are too small to be visible in either panel.

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Figure 2-a:
(Upper) Ratio of the emission density distribution between the b quark jets selected using either the DEEPJET b tagger or the T&P method to the b quark jets selected using generator-level information. (Lower) The detector-level and generator-level emission density distribution for b quark jets with 40 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 80 GeV in the POWHEG +PYTHIA\ $ \mathrm{t} \overline{\mathrm{t}} $ sample is shown with and without the partial b hadron reconstruction, either with generator-level information or with the transformer encoder. The statistical uncertainties are too small to be visible in either panel.

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Figure 2-b:
(Upper) Ratio of the emission density distribution between the b quark jets selected using either the DEEPJET b tagger or the T&P method to the b quark jets selected using generator-level information. (Lower) The detector-level and generator-level emission density distribution for b quark jets with 40 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 80 GeV in the POWHEG +PYTHIA\ $ \mathrm{t} \overline{\mathrm{t}} $ sample is shown with and without the partial b hadron reconstruction, either with generator-level information or with the transformer encoder. The statistical uncertainties are too small to be visible in either panel.

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Figure 3:
The measured emission density is shown differentially in $ {\ln(R/{\Delta R})} $ bins for b quark jets with (upper) 40 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 80 GeV and (lower) 80 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 200 GeV. The vertical error bars represents the statistical and systematics uncertainties summed in quadrature. The generator-level distributions from b quark jets selected in the dileptonic $ \mathrm{t} \overline{\mathrm{t}} $ samples generated with POWHEG +PYTHIA, and HERWIG with nominal or massless splitting kernels are shown. The generator-level distributions from light quark jets selected in the POWHEG + HERWIG $ \mathrm{t}\mathrm{W} $ sample are also shown. The middle panels show the ratio of the data to the MC predictions with a dashed line at one for reference. The total uncertainties of the data are shown as the gray band. The lower panels show the breakdown of the data uncertainties into various sources.

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Figure 3-a:
The measured emission density is shown differentially in $ {\ln(R/{\Delta R})} $ bins for b quark jets with (upper) 40 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 80 GeV and (lower) 80 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 200 GeV. The vertical error bars represents the statistical and systematics uncertainties summed in quadrature. The generator-level distributions from b quark jets selected in the dileptonic $ \mathrm{t} \overline{\mathrm{t}} $ samples generated with POWHEG +PYTHIA, and HERWIG with nominal or massless splitting kernels are shown. The generator-level distributions from light quark jets selected in the POWHEG + HERWIG $ \mathrm{t}\mathrm{W} $ sample are also shown. The middle panels show the ratio of the data to the MC predictions with a dashed line at one for reference. The total uncertainties of the data are shown as the gray band. The lower panels show the breakdown of the data uncertainties into various sources.

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Figure 3-b:
The measured emission density is shown differentially in $ {\ln(R/{\Delta R})} $ bins for b quark jets with (upper) 40 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 80 GeV and (lower) 80 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 200 GeV. The vertical error bars represents the statistical and systematics uncertainties summed in quadrature. The generator-level distributions from b quark jets selected in the dileptonic $ \mathrm{t} \overline{\mathrm{t}} $ samples generated with POWHEG +PYTHIA, and HERWIG with nominal or massless splitting kernels are shown. The generator-level distributions from light quark jets selected in the POWHEG + HERWIG $ \mathrm{t}\mathrm{W} $ sample are also shown. The middle panels show the ratio of the data to the MC predictions with a dashed line at one for reference. The total uncertainties of the data are shown as the gray band. The lower panels show the breakdown of the data uncertainties into various sources.

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Figure A1:
Architecture of the transformer encoder (TFE) trained to identify b hadron decay products in jets. Input to the network are three-dimensional arrays that represent the number of jets, the number of constituents in a jet, and the number of features. The first feed forward (FF1) block is a single-layered dense network that expands the feature dimension to 128. This is followed by the multihead attention (MHA) block with four heads, and another FF block (FF2) with two layers. Both keeps 128 hidden dimensions. Skip connections and layer normalizations (Add & norm) are added in between the MHA and FF1, and after FF2. The MHA, FF2, and Add & norm blocks are repeated together for four times. The final block is a single-layered FF (FF3) that contracts the final output to two-dimensional arrays representing a sequence of probabilities for each constituent in a jet to be a b hadron decay product or not.
Tables

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Table A1:
Performance of the TFE to identify b hadron decay products in jets in the training, testing, and validation sets of the POWHEG +PYTHIA dileptonic $ \mathrm{t} \overline{\mathrm{t}} $ sample.
Summary
In summary, a measurement of the emission density distribution in bottom quark initiated jets (b jets) from $\text{t}\bar{\text{t}}$ events in proton-proton collisions at $ \sqrt{s}= $ 13 TeV with the CMS detector is presented. A sample of b jets with minimized biases is selected with a tag-and-probe method. A transformer encoder is trained to partially reconstruct b hadrons in jets and preserve the angle-ordered emission history. The measured emission density distribution, corrected for detector effects, shows a suppression of collinear emissions relative to a {POWHEG v2.0} + {HERWIG v7.2.2} massless parton shower prediction for b jets with 40 $ {<}p_{\mathrm{T}}{<} $ 80 GeV. The measurement strongly disfavors the parton shower model without the dead-cone effect, and is in better agreement with the nominal massive parton shower. The distributions also show a strong suppression relative to a light quark baseline. This analysis provides a new benchmark for analytical quantum chromodynamics predictions including massive quark effects for parton shower model development, and for other studies of hadronic final states at high energies.
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