Jet radiation patterns are indispensable for the purpose of discriminating partons' with different quantum numbers. However, they are also vulnerable to various contaminations from the underlying event, pileup, and radiation of adjacent jets. In order to maximize the discrimination power, it is essential to optimize the jet radius used when analyzing the radiation patterns. We introduce the concept of jet radiation radius which quantifies how the jet radiation is distributed around the jet axes. We study the color and momentum dependence of the jet radiation radius, and discuss two applications: quark-gluon discrimination and $W$ jet tagging. In both cases, smaller (sub)jet radii are preferred for jets with higher PTs, albeit due to different mechanisms: the running of the QCD coupling constant and the boost to a color singlet system. A shrinking cone W jet tagging algorithm is proposed to achieve better discrimination than previous methods.

24 pages, 11 figures