Polarized simulations of $W^\pm$ or $Z$ boson production with hadronic decays

Understanding the polarization of massive vector bosons provides a powerful method to probe the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism and to test the Standard Model and its potential extensions. This thesis investigates hadronically decaying, polarized W ± and Z bosons at the LHC energy scale. By analyzing simulated events, the effects of different polarization states on jet substructure observables are explored. The results show that jets stemming from transversely polarized bosons often exhibit distinct two-pronged substructures, while longitudinally polarized bosons yield more isotropic jets. These polarization-dependent patterns manifest in variables such as N-subjettiness, transverse momentum correlation functions, and Fox-Wolfram moments. When attempting to distinguish vector boson jets from QCD jets in the context of highly boosted boson production, a simple mass-window selection on jet candidates offers only limited improvement in identifying vector boson jets. Moreover, relying solely on Fox-Wolfram moments is insufficient. Instead, more advanced jet substructure variables are required to achieve robust discrimination. Overall, this study highlights the sensitivity of jet substructure observables to vector boson polarization and provides insights for the development of future jet tagging algorithms.