Speaker: Jesse Thaler
When quarks and gluons are produced in high-energy collisions, their fragmentation and hadronization via QCD results in collimated sprays of particles called jets. While quark and gluon partons carry color charge, jets are composed of color-singlet hadrons, so there is no unambiguous definition of "quark" and "gluon" at the hadron level. Remarkably, a similar kind of problem is faced when analyzing the distribution of words in a set of documents, and there is a framework called "topic modeling" to identify emergent themes in a corpus without having to specify those themes a priori. In this talk, I present preliminary studies applying topic modeling to jet physics, and I speculate on a possible application of jet topics to extract the strong coupling constant.