Boosted Objects: A Probe of Beyond the Standard Model Physics

374 citations (254 excluding self-citations). The first BOOST workshop report, establishing the benchmarking methodology that the series would follow for the next decade.

The Problem

As the LHC began operations, a practical challenge emerged: heavy particles produced with high transverse momentum have their decay products collimated into a single jet. A boosted top quark, W, Z, or Higgs boson looks like one fat jet rather than the well-separated objects that traditional analyses were designed to find. Multiple groups had proposed jet substructure techniques — filtering, pruning, trimming, N-subjettiness — but there was no systematic comparison of their performance, no common benchmarks, and no consensus on which tools worked best under realistic conditions.

The Approach

The BOOST 2010 workshop at Oxford brought together theorists and experimentalists to benchmark substructure tools head-to-head on common signal and background samples. The report reviews the physics case for boosted objects in BSM searches, compares jet grooming techniques, evaluates top-tagging algorithms, and studies the sensitivity of substructure observables to Monte Carlo uncertainties. The standardized comparison framework became the template for subsequent BOOST reports in 2011 and 2012.

Recollections

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• DOI
• arXiv:1012.5412
• INSPIRE