Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• PC-JeDi: Diffusion for particle cloud generation in high energy physics

  Matthew Leigh, Debajyoti Sengupta, Guillaume Quétant, John Andrew Raine, Knut Zoch, Tobias Golling

  SciPost Phys. 16, 018 (2024) · published 19 January 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper, we present a new method to efficiently generate jets in High Energy Physics called PC-JeDi. This method utilises score-based diffusion models in conjunction with transformers which are well suited to the task of generating jets as particle clouds due to their permutation equivariance. PC-JeDi achieves competitive performance with current state-of-the-art methods across several metrics that evaluate the quality of the generated jets. Although slower than other models, due to the large number of forward passes required by diffusion models, it is still substantially faster than traditional detailed simulation. Furthermore, PC-JeDi uses conditional generation to produce jets with a desired mass and transverse momentum for two different particles, top quarks and gluons.

  13 citations

• Exploring jet substructure in semi-visible jets

  Deepak Kar, Sukanya Sinha

  SciPost Phys. 10, 084 (2021) · published 22 April 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Semi-visible jets arise in strongly interacting dark sectors, where parton evolution includes dark sector emissions, resulting in jets overlapping with missing transverse momentum. The implementation of semi-visible jets is done using the Pythia Hidden valley module to duplicate the QCD sector showering. In this work, several jet substructure observables have been examined to compare semi-visible jets and light quark/gluon jets. These comparisons were performed using different dark hadron fraction in the semi-visible jets (signal). The extreme scenarios where signal consists either of entirely dark hadrons or visible hadrons offers a chance to understand the effect of the specific dark shower model employed in these comparisons. We attempt to decouple the behaviour of jet-substructure observables due to inherent semi-visible jet properties, from model dependence owing to the existence of only one dark shower model as mentioned above.

  13 citations

• Using machine learning to disentangle LHC signatures of Dark Matter candidates

  Charanjit Kaur Khosa, Veronica Sanz, Michael Soughton

  SciPost Phys. 10, 151 (2021) · published 22 June 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the prospects of characterising Dark Matter at colliders using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. We focus on the monojet and missing transverse energy (MET) channel and propose a set of benchmark models for the study: a typical WIMP Dark Matter candidate in the form of a SUSY neutralino, a pseudo-Goldstone impostor in the shape of an Axion-Like Particle, and a light Dark Matter impostor whose interactions are mediated by a heavy particle. All these benchmarks are tensioned against each other, and against the main SM background ($Z$+jets). Our analysis uses both the leading-order kinematic features as well as the information of an additional hard jet. We explore different representations of the data, from a simple event data sample with values of kinematic variables fed into a Logistic Regression algorithm or a Fully Connected Neural Network, to a transformation of the data into images related to probability distributions, fed to Deep and Convolutional Neural Networks. We also study the robustness of our method against including detector effects, dropping kinematic variables, or changing the number of events per image. In the case of signals with more combinatorial possibilities (events with more than one hard jet), the most crucial data features are selected by performing a Principal Component Analysis. We compare the performance of all these methods, and find that using the 2D images of the combined information of multiple events significantly improves the discrimination performance.

  13 citations

• A Study of QCD Radiation in VBF Higgs Production with Vincia and Pythia

  Stefan Höche, Stephen Mrenna, Shay Payne, Christian T Preuss, Peter Skands

  SciPost Phys. 12, 010 (2022) · published 10 January 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We discuss and illustrate the properties of several parton-shower algorithms available in Pythia and Vincia, in the context of Higgs production via vector boson fusion (VBF). In particular, the distinctive colour topology of VBF processes allows to define observables sensitive to the coherent radiation pattern of additional jets. We study a set of such observables, using the Vincia sector-antenna shower as our main reference, and contrast it to Pythia's transverse-momentum-ordered DGLAP shower as well as Pythia's dipole-improved shower. We then investigate the robustness of these predictions as successive levels of higher-order perturbative matrix elements are incorporated, including next-to-leading-order matched and tree-level merged calculations, using Powheg Box and Sherpa respectively to generate the hard events.

  13 citations

• Constraining electroweakinos in the minimal Dirac gaugino model

  Mark D. Goodsell, Sabine Kraml, Humberto Reyes-González, Sophie L. Williamson

  SciPost Phys. 9, 047 (2020) · published 8 October 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Supersymmetric models with Dirac instead of Majorana gaugino masses have distinct phenomenological consequences. In this paper, we investigate the electroweakino sector of the Minimal Dirac Gaugino Supersymmetric Standard Model (MDGSSM) with regards to dark matter (DM) and collider constraints. We delineate the parameter space where the lightest neutralino of the MDGSSM is a viable DM candidate, that makes for at least part of the observed relic abundance while evading constraints from DM direct detection, LEP and lowenergy data, and LHC Higgs measurements. The collider phenomenology of the thus emerging scenarios is characterised by the richer electroweakino spectrum as compared to the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) -- 6 neutralinos and 3 charginos instead of 4 and 2 in the MSSM, naturally small mass splittings, and the frequent presence of long-lived particles, both charginos and/or neutralinos. Reinterpreting ATLAS and CMS analyses with the help of SModelS and MadAnalysis 5, we discuss the sensitivity of existing LHC searches for new physics to these scenarios and show which cases can be constrained and which escape detection. Finally, we propose a set of benchmark points which can be useful for further studies, designing dedicated experimental analyses and/or investigating the potential of future experiments.

  13 citations

• Goldstone equivalence and high energy electroweak physics

  Gabriel Cuomo, Luca Vecchi, Andrea Wulzer

  SciPost Phys. 8, 078 (2020) · published 15 May 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The transition between the broken and unbroken phases of massive gauge theories, namely the rearrangement of longitudinal and Goldstone degrees of freedom that occurs at high energy, is not manifestly smooth in the standard formalism. The lack of smoothness concretely shows up as an anomalous growth with energy of the longitudinal polarization vectors, as they emerge in Feynman rules both for real on-shell external particles and for virtual particles from the decomposition of the gauge field propagator. This makes the characterization of Feynman amplitudes in the high-energy limit quite cumbersome, which in turn poses peculiar challenges in the study of Electroweak processes at energies much above the Electroweak scale. We develop a Lorentz-covariant formalism where polarization vectors are well-behaved and, consequently, energy power-counting is manifest at the level of individual Feynman diagrams. This allows us to prove the validity of the Effective $W$ Approximation and, more generally, the factorization of collinear emissions and to compute the corresponding splitting functions at the tree-level order. Our formalism applies at all orders in perturbation theory, for arbitrary gauge groups and generic linear gauge-fixing functionals. It can be used to simplify Standard Model loop calculations by performing the high-energy expansion directly on the Feynman diagrams. This is illustrated by computing the radiative corrections to the decay of the top quark.

  13 citations

• An introduction to axions and their detection

  Igor García Irastorza

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 45 (2022) · published 29 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In these notes I try to introduce the reader to the topic of axions: their theoretical motivation and expected phenomenology, their role in astrophysics and as dark matter candidate, and the experimental techniques to detect them. Special emphasis is made in this last point, for which a relatively updated review of worldwide efforts and future prospects is made. The material is intended as an introduction to the topic, and it was prepared as lecture notes for Les Houches summer school 2021. Abundant references are included to direct the reader to deeper insight on the different aspects of axion physics.

  13 citations

• An optimal observable for color singlet identification

  Andy Buckley, Giuseppe Callea, Andrew J. Larkoski, Simone Marzani

  SciPost Phys. 9, 026 (2020) · published 26 August 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a novel approach to construct a color tagger, i.e. an observable that is able to discriminate the decay of a color-singlet into two jets from a two-jet background in a different color configuration. We do this by explicitly taking the ratio of the corresponding leading-order matrix elements in the soft limit, thus obtaining an observable that is provably optimal within our approximation. We call this observable the "jet color ring" and we compare its performance to other color-sensitive observables such as jet pull and dipolarity. We also assess the performance of the jet color ring in simulations by applying it to the case of the hadronic decays of a boosted Higgs boson and of an electroweak boson.

  12 citations

• Fingerprints of freeze-in dark matter in an early matter-dominated era

  Avik Banerjee, Debtosh Chowdhury

  SciPost Phys. 13, 022 (2022) · published 16 August 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the impact of an alternate cosmological history with an early matter-dominated epoch on the freeze-in production of dark matter. Such early matter domination is triggered by a meta-stable matter field dissipating into radiation. In general, the dissipation rate has a non-trivial temperature and scale factor dependence. Compared to the usual case of dark matter production via the freeze-in mechanism in a radiation-dominated universe, in this scenario, orders of magnitude larger coupling between the visible and the dark sector can be accommodated. Finally, as a proof of principle, we consider a specific model where the dark matter is produced by a sub-GeV dark photon having a kinetic mixing with the Standard Model photon. We point out that the parameter space of this model can be probed by the experiments in the presence of an early matter-dominated era.

  12 citations

• Twistor space origins of the Newman-Penrose map

  Kara Farnsworth, Michael L. Graesser, Gabriel Herczeg

  SciPost Phys. 13, 099 (2022) · published 24 October 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Recently, we introduced the "Newman-Penrose map", a novel correspondence between a certain class of solutions of Einstein's equations and self-dual solutions of the vacuum Maxwell equations, which we showed was closely related to the classical double copy. Here, we give an alternative definition of this correspondence in terms of quantities that are defined naturally on twistor space, and a shear-free null geodesic congruence on Minkowski space whose twistorial character is articulated by the Kerr theorem. The advantage of this reformulation is that it is purely geometrical in nature, being manifestly invariant under both spacetime diffeomorphisms and projective transformations on twistor space. While the original formulation of the map may be more convenient for most explicit calculations, the twistorial formulation we present here may be of greater theoretical utility.

  12 citations