Quark-gluon tagging with shower deconstruction: Unearthing dark matter and Higgs couplings

The separation of quark and gluon initiated jets can be an important way to improve the sensitivity in searches for new physics or in measurements of Higgs boson properties. We present a simplified version of the shower deconstruction approach as a novel observable for quark-gluon tagging. Assuming topoclusterlike objects as input, we compare our observable with energy correlation functions and find a favorable performance for a large variety of jet definitions. We address the issue of infrared sensitivity of quark-gluon discrimination. When this approach is applied to dark matter searches in monojet final states, limitations from small signal-to-background ratios can be overcome. We also show that quark-gluon tagging is an alternative way of separating weak boson from gluon-fusion production in the process p+p→H+jet+jet+X.