Delphi Direct Evolution Lite 2011 16
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In particle collider experiments, elementary particle interactions with large momentum transfer produce quarks and gluons (known as partons) whose evolution is governed by the strong force, as described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD)1. These partons subsequently emit further partons in a process that can be described as a parton shower2, which culminates in the formation of detectable hadrons. Studying the pattern of the parton shower is one of the key experimental tools for testing QCD. This pattern is expected to depend on the mass of the initiating parton, through a phenomenon known as the dead-cone effect, which predicts a suppression of the gluon spectrum emitted by a heavy quark of mass mQ and energy E, within a cone of angular size mQ/E around the emitter3. Previously, a direct observation of the dead-cone effect in QCD had not been possible, owing to the challenge of reconstructing the cascading quarks and gluons from the experimentally accessible hadrons. We report the direct observation of the QCD dead cone by using new iterative declustering techniques4,5 to reconstruct the parton shower of charm quarks. This result confirms a fundamental feature of QCD. Furthermore, the measurement of a dead-cone angle constitutes a direct experimental observation of the non-zero mass of the charm quark, which is a fundamental constant in the standard model of particle physics.
In particle colliders, quarks and gluons are produced in high-energy interactions through processes with large momentum transfer, which are calculable and well described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD). These partons undergo subsequent emissions, resulting in the production of more quarks and gluons. This evolution can be described in the collinear limit by a cascade process known as a parton shower, which transfers the original parton energy to multiple lower energy particles. This shower then evolves into a multi-particle final state, with the partons combining into a spray of experimentally detectable hadrons known as a jet6. The pattern of the parton shower is expected to depend on the mass of the emitting parton, through a phenomenon known as the dead-cone effect, whereby the radiation from an emitter of mass m and energy E is suppressed at angular scales smaller than m/E, relative to the direction of the emitter. The dead-cone effect is a fundamental feature of all gauge field theories (see ref. 3 for the derivation of the dead cone in QCD).
This splitting tree is then iteratively declustered by unwinding the reclustering history, to access the building blocks of the reconstructed jet shower. At each declustering step, two prongs corresponding to a splitting are returned. The angle between these splitting daughter prongs, θ, the relative transverse momentum of the splitting, kT, and the sum of the energy of the two prongs, ERadiator, are registered. As the charm flavour is conserved throughout the showering process, the full reconstruction of the D0-meson candidate enables the isolation of the emissions of the charm quark in the parton shower, by following the daughter prong containing the fully reconstructed D0-meson candidate at each declustering step. This can be seen in the bottom part of Fig. 1, which shows the evolution of the charm quark reconstructed from the measured final state particles. Moreover, the kinematic properties of the charm quark are updated along the splitting tree, enabling an accurate reconstruction of each emission angle against the dynamically evolving charm-quark direction. It was verified that in more than 99% of the cases the prong containing the D0-meson candidate at each splitting coincided with the leading prong. This means that following the D0-meson candidate or leading prong at each step is equivalent, and therefore a complementary measurement for an inclusive jet sample, when no flavour tagging is available, can be made by following the leading prong through the reclustering history. As the inclu