Investigating jet charge for heavy and light quark jets in LHCb kinematics

In high-energy proton-proton collisions, quarks and gluons can escape the strong force bond and produce conical sprays of new hadrons called jets. Jet charge is an observable which is calculated as a momentum-weighted sum of the electric charges of the hadrons in the jet. It was developed to try to determine the flavor of quark initiating a jet, in particular for light quark jets, based on Monte Carlo simulations of how light quarks hadronize. It is extremely difficult in data to obtain a high-purity sample of light quark jets of a particular flavor, which is why Monte Carlo simulations are relied on. However, if we see in the detector a jet with a hadron containing a heavy quark, we can confirm using actual data that the jet was initiated by that specific heavy quark produced in the proton-proton collision. In this project, we study how well the jet charge observable performs to successfully identify the specific electric charge and flavor of the quark for heavy quark jets in LHCb kinematics, where we have both Monte Carlo and high-purity real data samples available. In this way, we try to verify the accuracy and range of applicability of the jet charge observable.