SEARCHES FOR NEW PARTICLES USING CONE AND CLUSTER JET ALGORITHMS - A COMPARATIVE-STUDY

We discuss the reconstruction of the hadronic decays of heavy particle s using jet algorithms. The ability to reconstruct the mass of the dec aying particle is compared between a traditional cone-type algorithm a nd a recently proposed cluster-type algorithm. The specific examples c onsidered are the semileptonic decays of a heavy Higgs boson at square -root s = 16 TeV, and of top quark-antiquark pairs at square-root s = 1.8 TeV. We find that the cluster algorithm offers considerable advant ages in the former case, and a slight advantage in the latter. We brie fly discuss the effects of calorimeter energy resolution, and show tha t a typical resolution dilutes these advantages, but does not remove t hem entirely.