Boosted top quark tagging is one of the challenging, and at the same time exciting, tasks in high energy physics experiments, in particular in the exploration of new physics signals at the LHC. Several techniques have already been developed to tag a boosted top quark in its hadronic decay channel. Recently tagging the same in the semileptonic channel has begun to receive a lot of attention. In the current study, we develop a methodology to tag a boosted top quark ($p_T>200\mathrm{GeV}$) in its semileptonic decay channel with a $\tau$-lepton in the final state. In this analysis, the constituents of the top fatjet are reclustered using jet substructure technique to obtain the subjets, and then $b$- and $\tau$- like subjets are identified by applying standard $b$- and $\tau$-jet identification algorithms. We show that the dominant QCD background can be rejected effectively using several kinematic variables of these subjects, such as energy sharing among the jets, invariant mass, transverse mass, $N$-subjettiness etc., leading to high signal tagging efficiencies. We further assess possible improvements in the results by employing multivariate analysis techniques. We find that using this proposed top-tagger, a signal efficiency of $\sim 77\%$ against a background efficiency of $\sim 3\%$ can be achieved. We also extend the proposed top-tagger to the case of polarized top quarks by introducing a few additional observables calculated in the rest frame of the $b-\tau$ system. We comment on how the same methodology will be useful for tagging a boosted heavy BSM particle with a $b$ and $\tau$ in the final state.

• Received 4 June 2023
• Accepted 24 July 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.108.035011

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Published by the American Physical Society