We introduce shower deconstruction, a method to look for new physics in a hadronic environment. The method aims to be a full information approach using small jets. It assigns to each event a number $\chi$ that is an estimate of the ratio of the probability for a signal process to produce that event to the probability for a background process to produce that event. The analytic functions we derive to calculate these probabilities mimic what full event generators like Pythia or Herwig do and can be depicted in a diagrammatic way. As an example, we apply this method to a boosted Higgs boson produced in association with a $Z$ boson and show that this method can be useful to discriminate this signal from the $Z+\mathrm{\text{jets}}$ background.

• Received 25 February 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.84.074002