Dynamical grooming of QCD jets

Abstract

We propose a new class of infrared-collinear and Sudakov safe observables with an associated jet grooming technique that removes dynamically soft and large angle branches. It is based on identifying the hardest branch in the Cambridge/Aachen reclustering sequence and discarding prior splittings that occur at larger angles. This leads to a dynamically generated cutoff on the phase space of the tagged splitting that is encoded in a Sudakov form factor. In this exploratory study we focus on the mass and momentum sharing distributions of the tagged splitting which we analyze analytically to modified leading-logarithmic accuracy and compare to Monte Carlo simulations.