  We introduce a new approach for jet physics studies using subtracted
cumulants of jet substructure observables, which are shown to be insensitive to
contributions from soft-particle emissions uncorrelated with the hard process.
Therefore subtracted cumulants allow comparisons between theoretical
calculations and experimental measurements without the complication of large
background contaminations such as underlying and pile-up events in hadron
collisions. We test our method using subtracted jet mass cumulants by comparing
Monte Carlo simulations to analytic calculations performed using soft-collinear
effective theory. We find that, for proton-proton collisions, the method
efficiently eliminates contributions from multiparton interactions and pile-up
events. We also find within theoretical uncertainty our analytic calculations
are in good agreement with the subtracted cumulants calculated by using ATLAS
jet mass measurements.
