Jet Charge at the LHC

Knowing the charge of the parton initiating a light-quark jet could be extremely useful both for testing aspects of the standard model and for characterizing potential beyond-the-standard-model signals. We show that despite the complications of hadronization and out-of-jet radiation such as pileup, a weighted sum of the charges of a jet's constituents can be used at the LHC to distinguish among jets with different charges. Potential applications include measuring electroweak quantum numbers of hadronically decaying resonances or supersymmetric particles, as well as standard model tests, such as jet charge in dijet events or in hadronically decaying W bosons in t (t) over bar events. We develop a systematically improvable method to calculate moments of these charge distributions by combining multihadron fragmentation functions with perturbative jet functions and pertubative evolution equations. We show that the dependence on energy and jet size for the average and width of the jet charge can be calculated despite the large experimental uncertainty on fragmentation functions. These calculations can provide a validation tool for data independent of Monte Carlo fragmentation models.