Investigating Groomed Jet Mass Spectra through Soft Drop Techniques in Proton–Proton Interactions

The measurement of jet mass distributions in proton–proton collisions provides a powerful probe of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) dynamics and the internal structure of hadronic jets. However, the jet mass observable is highly sensitive to soft wide-angle radiation, underlying-event activity, and non-perturbative effects, which complicate precise theoretical predictions. In this work, we investigate the application of the Soft Drop grooming algorithm to the calculation of the resummed jet mass distribution in proton–proton processes. Soft Drop systematically removes soft, large-angle emissions from reconstructed jets according to a momentum-sharing criterion characterized by the grooming parameters $(z_{\mathrm{cut}})$ and $(\beta)$, thereby reducing contamination from non-global and non-perturbative contributions. Using factorization techniques within perturbative QCD and effective field theory methods, the groomed jet mass spectrum is decomposed into hard, collinear, and soft components, enabling the resummation of large logarithms of the dimensionless jet mass variable $(\rho = m_J^2/(p_T^2R^2))$ to all orders in the strong coupling. The resulting predictions achieve improved perturbative convergence and reduced theoretical uncertainties compared with ungroomed jet mass calculations. We present the structure of the resummed cross-section, discuss the role of Soft Drop in modifying the soft radiation phase space, and highlight its impact on logarithmic accuracy and sensitivity to hadronization effects. The study demonstrates that Soft Drop-groomed jet mass observables provide a theoretically robust framework for precision QCD studies and for comparisons with experimental measurements at high-energy proton–proton colliders such as the CERN Large Hadron Collider.