Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• A natural composite Higgs via universal boundary conditions

  Simone Blasi, Csaba Csaki, Florian Goertz

  SciPost Phys. 10, 121 (2021) · published 31 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a novel realization of a composite Higgs, which can naturally produce top partners above the current LHC bounds without increasing the tuning above 10%. The essential ingredients are softened breaking of the Higgs shift symmetry as well as maximal symmetry, which turn out to perfectly complement each other. The 5D realization of this model is particularly simple: universal UV and IR boundary conditions for the bulk fermions containing the SM fields will cure the problems of existing holographic composite Higgs models and provide a complete viable model for a naturally light Higgs without much tuning.

  7 citations

• Efficient phase-space generation for hadron collider event simulation

  Enrico Bothmann, Taylor Childers, Walter Giele, Florian Herren, Stefan Höche, Joshua Isaacson, Max Knobbe, Rui Wang

  SciPost Phys. 15, 169 (2023) · published 18 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a simple yet efficient algorithm for phase-space integration at hadron colliders. Individual mappings consist of a single t-channel combined with any number of s-channel decays, and are constructed using diagrammatic information. The factorial growth in the number of channels is tamed by providing an option to limit the number of s-channel topologies. We provide a publicly available, parallelized code in C++ and test its performance in typical LHC scenarios.

  7 citations

• Exclusive emissions of rho-mesons and the unintegrated gluon distribution

  Andrèe Dafne Bolognino, Francesco Giovanni Celiberto, Dmitry Yu. Ivanov, Alessandro Papa

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 089 (2022) · published 13 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Exclusive emissions of vector mesons in forward directions of rapidity offer us a faultless chance to probe the proton structure at small-$x$. A high-energy factorization formula is established within BFKL, given as the convolution of an impact factor depicting the forward-meson emission and of an unintegrated gluon distribution (UGD) driving the gluon evolution at small-$x$. As a nonperturbative quantity, the UGD is not well known and several models for it exist. We present recent progresses on the study of the exclusive forward $\rho$-meson leptoproduction at HERA and EIC energies, showing how osbervables sensitive to different polarization states of the $\rho$-particle act as discriminators for the existing UGD models.

  7 citations

• The WIMP paradigm: Theme and variations

  Jonathan L. Feng

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 71 (2023) · published 13 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  WIMPs, ↑ weakly-interacting massive particles, have been leading candidates for particle dark matter for decades, and they remain a viable and highly motivated possibility. In these lectures, I describe the basic motivations for WIMPs, beginning with the WIMP miracle and its under-appreciated cousin, the discrete WIMP miracle. I then give an overview of some of the basic features of WIMPs and how to find them. These lectures conclude with some variations on the WIMP theme that have by now become significant topics in their own right and illustrate the richness of the WIMP paradigm.

  7 citations

• Interleaved resonance decays and electroweak radiation in the Vincia parton shower

  Helen Brooks, Peter Skands, Rob Verheyen

  SciPost Phys. 12, 101 (2022) · published 22 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a framework for high-energy interactions in which resonance decays and electroweak branching processes are interleaved with the QCD evolution in a single com- mon sequence of decreasing resolution scales. The interleaved treatment of resonance decays allows for a new treatment of finite-width effects in parton showers. At scales above their offshellness (i.e., typically Q > Γ ), resonances participate explicitly as incom- ing and outgoing states in branching processes, while they are effectively “integrated out” of the description at lower scales. We implement this formalism, together with a full set of antenna functions for branching processes involving electroweak (W/Z/H) bosons in the Vincia shower module in Pythia 8.3, and study some of the consequences

  7 citations

• Birdtracks for SU(N)

  Stefan Keppeler

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 3 (2018) · published 27 September 2018 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  I gently introduce the diagrammatic birdtrack notation, first for vector algebra and then for permutations. After moving on to general tensors I review some recent results on Hermitian Young operators, gluon projectors, and multiplet bases for SU(N) colour space.

  7 citations

• Reconstructing the EFT of inflation from cosmological data

  Amel Durakovic, Paul Hunt, Subodh P. Patil, Subir Sarkar

  SciPost Phys. 7, 049 (2019) · published 10 October 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Reconstructions of the primordial power spectrum (PPS) of curvature perturbations from cosmic microwave background anisotropies and large-scale structure data suggest that the usually assumed power-law PPS has localised features (up to $\sim 10\%$ in amplitude), although of only marginal significance in the framework of $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. On the other hand if the underlying cosmology is assumed to be Einstein-de Sitter, larger features in the PPS (up to $\sim 20\%$) are required to accurately fit the observed acoustic peaks. Within the context of single clock inflation, we show that any given reconstruction of the PPS can be mapped on to functional parameters of the underlying effective theory of the adiabatic mode within a 2nd-order formalism, provided the best fit fractional change of the PPS, $\Delta\mathcal{P}_\mathcal{R}/\mathcal{P}_\mathcal{R}$ is such that $(\Delta\mathcal{P}_\mathcal{R}/\mathcal{P}_\mathcal{R})^3$ falls within the $1\,\sigma$ confidence interval of the reconstruction for features induced by variations of either the sound speed $c_\mathrm{s}$ or the slow-roll parameter $\epsilon$. Although there is a degeneracy amongst these functional parameters (and the models that project onto them), we can identify simple representative inflationary models that yield such features in the PPS. Thus we provide a dictionary (more accurately, a thesaurus) to go from observational data, via the reconstructed PPS, to models that reproduce them to per cent level precision.

  7 citations

• Loop amplitudes from precision networks

  Simon Badger, Anja Butter, Michel Luchmann, Sebastian Pitz, Tilman Plehn

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 034 (2023) · published 25 April 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Evaluating loop amplitudes is a time-consuming part of LHC event generation. For di-photon production with jets we show that simple, Bayesian networks can learn such amplitudes and model their uncertainties reliably. A boosted training of the Bayesian network further improves the uncertainty estimate and the network precision in critical phase space regions. In general, boosted network training of Bayesian networks allows us to move between fit-like and interpolation-like regimes of network training.

  7 citations

• On the quark spectral function in QCD

  Jan Horak, Jan M. Pawlowski, Nicolas Wink

  SciPost Phys. 15, 149 (2023) · published 10 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We calculate the spectral function of light quark flavours in 2+1 flavour vacuum QCD in the isospin-symmetric approximation. We employ spectral Dyson-Schwinger equations and compute the non-perturbative quark propagator directly in real-time, using recent spectral reconstruction results from Gaussian process regression of gluon propagator data in 2+1 flavour lattice QCD. Our results feature a pole-like peak structure at time-like momenta larger than the propagator's gapping scale as well as a negative scattering continuum, which we exploit assuming an analytic pole-tail split during the iterative solution. The computation is augmented with a general discussion of the impact of the quark-gluon vertex and the gluon propagator on the analytic structure of the quark propagator. In particular, we investigate under which conditions the quark propagator shows unphysical complex poles. Our results offer a wide range of applications, encompassing the ab-initio calculation of transport as well as resonance properties in QCD.

  7 citations

• Unweighting multijet event generation using factorisation-aware neural networks

  Timo Janßen, Daniel Maître, Steffen Schumann, Frank Siegert, Henry Truong

  SciPost Phys. 15, 107 (2023) · published 21 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this article we combine a recently proposed method for factorisation-aware matrix element surrogates with an unbiased unweighting algorithm. We show that employing a sophisticated neural network emulation of QCD multijet matrix elements based on dipole factorisation can lead to a drastic acceleration of unweighted event generation. We train neural networks for a selection of partonic channels contributing at the tree-level to $Z+4,5$ jets and $t\bar{t}+3,4$ jets production at the LHC which necessitates a generalisation of the dipole emulation model to include initial state partons as well as massive final state quarks. We also present first steps towards the emulation of colour-sampled amplitudes. We incorporate these emulations as fast and accurate surrogates in a two-stage rejection sampling algorithm within the SHERPA Monte Carlo that yields unbiased unweighted events suitable for phenomenological analyses and post-processing in experimental workflows, e.g. as input to a time-consuming detector simulation. For the computational cost of unweighted events we achieve a reduction by factors between $16$ and $350$ for the considered channels.

  6 citations