Boosted Objects: A Probe of Beyond the Standard Model Physics
12/24/2010
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
I had founded the BOOST workshop at SLAC in 2009 with the goal of unifying what had been scattered individual efforts on collimated particles into a single community. Before BOOST, people were working on various aspects of boosted physics — fat jets, substructure, top tagging — but it wasn’t recognized that these were all part of the same effort. The conference was explicitly designed to bring theorists and experimentalists together, and the whole field still felt very new.
The 2010 workshop at Oxford was the second incarnation. I gave a presentation on different theoretical models that would motivate boosted physics searches. These were the first conference proceedings from the series, and I hadn’t appreciated at the time how important proceedings could be at further unifying a community. Having a shared written document that benchmarked tools and established common standards turned out to matter as much as the talks themselves.
That the BOOST conference is still going in 2025, having finished its 17th round, is remarkable. When I was a graduate student, I remember attending the SUSY conference in its 12th year and thinking it was an ancient, established institution that I was honored to attend. BOOST has now surpassed that.