In this thesis, we use the CMS Open Data to study the 2-prong substructure of jets. We use CMS's particle flow reconstruction algorithm to obtain jet constituents, which we then use to perform various jet substructure studies. After validating our basic kinematics and substructure results through a comparison to results from parton shower generators, we extract the 2-prong substructure of the leading jet using the soft drop algorithm. We find good agreement between the results from the Open Data and those obtained from parton shower generators. For the 2-prong substructure, we also compare to analytic calculations performed to modified leading-logarithmic accuracy. To our best knowledge, this is the first ever physics analysis based on the CMS Open Data.

This concise primer reviews the latest developments in the field of jets. Jets are collinear sprays of hadrons produced in very high-energy collisions, e.g. at the LHC or at a future hadron collider. They are essential to and ubiquitous in experimental analyses, making their study crucial. At present LHC energies and beyond, massive particles around the electroweak scale are frequently produced with transverse momenta that are much larger than their mass, i.e., boosted. The decay products of such boosted massive objects tend to occupy only a relatively small and confined area of the detector and are observed as a single jet. Jets hence arise from many different sources and it is important to be able to distinguish the rare events with boosted resonances from the large backgrounds originating from Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). This requires familiarity with the internal properties of jets, such as their different radiation patterns, a field broadly known as jet substructure. This set of notes begins by providing a phenomenological motivation, explaining why the study of jets and their substructure is of particular importance for the current and future program of the LHC, followed by a brief but insightful introduction to QCD and to hadron-collider phenomenology. The next section introduces jets as complex objects constructed from a sequential recombination algorithm. In this context some experimental aspects are also reviewed. Since jet substructure calculations are multi-scale problems that call for all-order treatments (resummations), the bases of such calculations are discussed for simple jet quantities. With these QCD and jet physics ingredients in hand, readers can then dig into jet substructure itself. Accordingly, these notes first highlight the main concepts behind substructure techniques and introduce a list of the main jet substructure tools that have been used over the past decade. Analytic calculations are then provided for several families of tools, the goal being to identify their key characteristics. In closing, the book provides an overview of LHC searches and measurements where jet substructure techniques are used, reviews the main take-home messages, and outlines future perspectives.

Jets are collimated, high energy streams of particles that are ubiquitous at hadron colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It has been recognized that jets are a feature of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD). QCD predicts an approximate scaling behavior at high energies. Due to the very high energies made available by the LHC, the decay products of heavy, unstable particles can also be collimated into a narrow cone and these are observed as jets by the LHC experiments. Recently, there has been significant interest in studying the substructure of jets with the goal of discriminating QCD jets from jets initiated by heavy particle decay. In this thesis, I will describe the modeling of jets in QCD as well as the pattern of radiation from heavy particles, such as the top quark. This will lead to a discussion of a correlation function on the constituents of a jet that is useful in understanding jet substructure. This correlation function encodes angular scaling properties of jets and its behavior in QCD will be studied.

Astrophysical observations of gravitational interactions provide strong evidence for the existence of dark matter. Many theories propose and experiments test the hypothesis that dark matter may have a particle physics origin, but this remains unproven. One such experiment is the Compact Muon Solenoid at the Large Hadron Collider. If dark matter couples, at least lightly, to the Standard Model, then it is possible to produce it in collisions at the LHC. Because it would not interact with the detector, we must look for collisions in which dark matter is produced in association with one or more SM particles. This thesis describes two such analyses: dark matter plus one top quark and dark matter plus two light quarks. Both cases result in complicated detector signatures due to the hadronization of final-state quarks. Recently developed jet substructure techniques were applied using novel methods to identify the hadronization products of high-momentum top quarks. In both analyses, the observed data is found to be consistent with SM backgrounds. We translate these results into the most stringent constraints to date on the relevant beyond-SM models.