Snowmass 2001 : jet energy flow project

Conventional cone jet algorithms arose from heuristic considerations of LO hard scattering coupled to independent showering. These algorithms implicitly assume that the final states of individual events can be mapped onto a unique set of jets that are in turn associated with a unique set of underlying hard scattering partons. Thus each final state hadron is assigned to a unique underlying parton. The Jet Energy Flow (JEF) analysis described here does not make such assumptions. The final states of individual events are instead described in terms of flow distributions of hadronic energy. Quantities of physical interest are constructed from the energy flow distribution summed over all events. The resulting analysis is less sensitive to higher order perturbative corrections and the impact of showering and hadronization than the standard cone algorithms