Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Tau-lepton Physics at the FCC-ee circular e$^+$e$^-$ Collider

  Mogens Dam

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 1, 041 (2019) · published 21 February 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The future FCC-ee collider is designed to deliver $\mathrm{e^+e^-}$ collisions to study with ultimate precision the Z, W, and Higgs bosons, and the top quark. In a high-statistics scan around the Z pole, $1.3\times 10^{11}$ events $\mathrm{Z}\to\tau\tau$ will be produced, the largest sample of $\tau\tau$ events foreseen at any lepton collider. With their large boost, $\tau$ leptons from Z decays are particularly well suited for precision measurements. The focus of this report is on tests of lepton universality from precision measurement of $\boldsymbol{\tau}$ properties and on tests of charged lepton flavour violation in Z decays and in $\tau$ decays. In both of these areas, FCC-ee promises sensitivities well beyond present experimental limits.

  39 citations

• EPiC-GAN: Equivariant point cloud generation for particle jets

  Erik Buhmann, Gregor Kasieczka, Jesse Thaler

  SciPost Phys. 15, 130 (2023) · published 3 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  With the vast data-collecting capabilities of current and future high-energy collider experiments, there is an increasing demand for computationally efficient simulations. Generative machine learning models enable fast event generation, yet so far these approaches are largely constrained to fixed data structures and rigid detector geometries. In this paper, we introduce EPiC-GAN - equivariant point cloud generative adversarial network - which can produce point clouds of variable multiplicity. This flexible framework is based on deep sets and is well suited for simulating sprays of particles called jets. The generator and discriminator utilize multiple EPiC layers with an interpretable global latent vector. Crucially, the EPiC layers do not rely on pairwise information sharing between particles, which leads to a significant speed-up over graph- and transformer-based approaches with more complex relation diagrams. We demonstrate that EPiC-GAN scales well to large particle multiplicities and achieves high generation fidelity on benchmark jet generation tasks.

  37 citations

• Mass agnostic jet taggers

  Layne Bradshaw, Rashmish K. Mishra, Andrea Mitridate, Bryan Ostdiek

  SciPost Phys. 8, 011 (2020) · published 24 January 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Searching for new physics in large data sets needs a balance between two competing effects---signal identification vs background distortion. In this work, we perform a systematic study of both single variable and multivariate jet tagging methods that aim for this balance. The methods preserve the shape of the background distribution by either augmenting the training procedure or the data itself. Multiple quantitative metrics to compare the methods are considered, for tagging 2-, 3-, or 4-prong jets from the QCD background. This is the first study to show that the data augmentation techniques of Planing and PCA based scaling deliver similar performance as the augmented training techniques of Adversarial NN and uBoost, but are both easier to implement and computationally cheaper.

  36 citations

• Accelerating Monte Carlo event generation -- rejection sampling using neural network event-weight estimates

  Katharina Danziger, Timo Janßen, Steffen Schumann, Frank Siegert

  SciPost Phys. 12, 164 (2022) · published 18 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The generation of unit-weight events for complex scattering processes presents a severe challenge to modern Monte Carlo event generators. Even when using sophisticated phase-space sampling techniques adapted to the underlying transition matrix elements, the efficiency for generating unit-weight events from weighted samples can become a limiting factor in practical applications. Here we present a novel two-staged unweighting procedure that makes use of a neural-network surrogate for the full event weight. The algorithm can significantly accelerate the unweighting process, while it still guarantees unbiased sampling from the correct target distribution. We apply, validate and benchmark the new approach in high-multiplicity LHC production processes, including $Z/W$+4 jets and $t\bar{t}$+3 jets, where we find speed-up factors up to ten.

  36 citations

• Reinterpretation of LHC Results for New Physics: Status and recommendations after Run 2

  Waleed Abdallah, Shehu AbdusSalam, Azar Ahmadov, Amine Ahriche, Gaël Alguero, Benjamin C. Allanach, Jack Y. Araz, Alexandre Arbey, Chiara Arina, Peter Athron, Emanuele Bagnaschi, Yang Bai, Michael J. Baker, Csaba Balazs, Daniele Barducci, Philip Bechtle, Aoife Bharucha, Andy Buckley, Jonathan Butterworth, Haiying Cai, Claudio Campagnari, Cari Cesarotti, Marcin Chrzaszcz, Andrea Coccaro, Eric Conte, Jonathan M. Cornell, Louie Dartmoor Corpe, Matthias Danninger, Luc Darmé, Aldo Deandrea, Nishita Desai, Barry Dillon, Caterina Doglioni, Juhi Dutta, John R. Ellis, Sebastian Ellis, Farida Fassi, Matthew Feickert, Nicolas Fernandez, Sylvain Fichet, Jernej F. Kamenik, Thomas Flacke, Benjamin Fuks, Achim Geiser, Marie-Hélène Genest, Akshay Ghalsasi, Tomas Gonzalo, Mark Goodsell, Stefania Gori, Philippe Gras, Admir Greljo, Diego Guadagnoli, Sven Heinemeyer, Lukas A. Heinrich, Jan Heisig, Deog Ki Hong, Tetiana Hryn'ova, Katri Huitu, Philip Ilten, Ahmed Ismail, Adil Jueid, Felix Kahlhoefer, Jan Kalinowski, Deepak Kar, Yevgeny Kats, Charanjit K. Khosa, Valeri Khoze, Tobias Klingl, Pyungwon Ko, Kyoungchul Kong, Wojciech Kotlarski, Michael Krämer, Sabine Kraml, Suchita Kulkarni, Anders Kvellestad, Clemens Lange, Kati Lassila-Perini, Seung J. Lee, Andre Lessa, Zhen Liu, Lara Lloret Iglesias, Jeanette M. Lorenz, Danika MacDonell, Farvah Mahmoudi, Judita Mamuzic, Andrea C. Marini, Pete Markowitz, Pablo Martinez Ruiz del Arbol, David Miller, Vasiliki Mitsou, Stefano Moretti, Marco Nardecchia, Siavash Neshatpour, Dao Thi Nhung, Per Osland, Patrick H. Owen, Orlando Panella, Alexander Pankov, Myeonghun Park, Werner Porod, Darren Price, Harrison Prosper, Are Raklev, Jürgen Reuter, Humberto Reyes-González, Thomas Rizzo, Tania Robens, Juan Rojo, Janusz A. Rosiek, Oleg Ruchayskiy, Veronica Sanz, Kai Schmidt-Hoberg, Pat Scott, Sezen Sekmen, Dipan Sengupta, Elizabeth Sexton-Kennedy, Hua-Sheng Shao, Seodong Shin, Luca Silvestrini, Ritesh Singh, Sukanya Sinha, Jory Sonneveld, Yotam Soreq, Giordon H. Stark, Tim Stefaniak, Jesse Thaler, Riccardo Torre, Emilio Torrente-Lujan, Gokhan Unel, Natascia Vignaroli, Wolfgang Waltenberger, Nicholas Wardle, Graeme Watt, Georg Weiglein, Martin J. White, Sophie L. Williamson, Jonas Wittbrodt, Lei Wu, Stefan Wunsch, Tevong You, Yang Zhang, José Zurita

  SciPost Phys. 9, 022 (2020) · published 21 August 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We report on the status of efforts to improve the reinterpretation of searches and measurements at the LHC in terms of models for new physics, in the context of the LHC Reinterpretation Forum. We detail current experimental offerings in direct searches for new particles, measurements, technical implementations and Open Data, and provide a set of recommendations for further improving the presentation of LHC results in order to better enable reinterpretation in the future. We also provide a brief description of existing software reinterpretation frameworks and recent global analyses of new physics that make use of the current data.

  34 citations

• A guide for deploying Deep Learning in LHC searches: How to achieve optimality and account for uncertainty

  Benjamin Nachman

  SciPost Phys. 8, 090 (2020) · published 23 June 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Deep learning tools can incorporate all of the available information into a search for new particles, thus making the best use of the available data. This paper reviews how to optimally integrate information with deep learning and explicitly describes the corresponding sources of uncertainty. Simple illustrative examples show how these concepts can be applied in practice.

  34 citations

• SPANet: Generalized permutationless set assignment for particle physics using symmetry preserving attention

  Alexander Shmakov, Michael James Fenton, Ta-Wei Ho, Shih-Chieh Hsu, Daniel Whiteson, Pierre Baldi

  SciPost Phys. 12, 178 (2022) · published 30 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The creation of unstable heavy particles at the Large Hadron Collider is the most direct way to address some of the deepest open questions in physics. Collisions typically produce variable-size sets of observed particles which have inherent ambiguities complicating the assignment of observed particles to the decay products of the heavy particles. Current strategies for tackling these challenges in the physics community ignore the physical symmetries of the decay products and consider all possible assignment permutations and do not scale to complex configurations. Attention based deep learning methods for sequence modelling have achieved state-of-the-art performance in natural language processing, but they lack built-in mechanisms to deal with the unique symmetries found in physical set-assignment problems. We introduce a novel method for constructing symmetry-preserving attention networks which reflect the problem's natural invariances to efficiently find assignments without evaluating all permutations. This general approach is applicable to arbitrarily complex configurations and significantly outperforms current methods, improving reconstruction efficiency between 19\% - 35\% on typical benchmark problems while decreasing inference time by two to five orders of magnitude on the most complex events, making many important and previously intractable cases tractable. A full code repository containing a general library, the specific configuration used, and a complete dataset release, are avaiable at https://github.com/Alexanders101/SPANet

  34 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.

  34 citations

• Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated: $N$-subjettiness taggers take on jet images

  Liam Moore, Karl Nordström, Sreedevi Varma, Malcolm Fairbairn

  SciPost Phys. 7, 036 (2019) · published 24 September 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We compare the performance of a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on jet images with dense neural networks (DNNs) trained on n-subjettiness variables to study the distinguishing power of these two separate techniques applied to top quark decays. We find that they perform almost identically and are highly correlated once jet mass information is included, which suggests they are accessing the same underlying information which can be intuitively understood as being contained in 4-, 5-, 6-, and 8-body kinematic phase spaces depending on the sample. This suggests both of these methods are highly useful for heavy object tagging and provides a tentative answer to the question of what the image network is actually learning.

  33 citations

• Testing new physics models with global comparisons to collider measurements: the Contur toolkit

  A. Buckley, J. M. Butterworth, L. Corpe, M. Habedank, D. Huang, D. Yallup, M. Altakach, G. Bassman, I. Lagwankar, J. Rocamonde, H. Saunders, B. Waugh, G. Zilgalvis

  SciPost Phys. Core 4, 013 (2021) · published 20 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Measurements at particle collider experiments, even if primarily aimed at understanding Standard Model processes, can have a high degree of model independence, and implicitly contain information about potential contributions from physics beyond the Standard Model. The Contur package allows users to benefit from the hundreds of measurements preserved in the Rivet library to test new models against the bank of LHC measurements to date. This method has proven to be very effective in several recent publications from the Contur team, but ultimately, for this approach to be successful, the authors believe that the Contur tool needs to be accessible to the wider high energy physics community. As such, this manual accompanies the first user-facing version: Contur v2. It describes the design choices that have been made, as well as detailing pitfalls and common issues to avoid. The authors hope that with the help of this documentation, external groups will be able to run their own Contur studies, for example when proposing a new model, or pitching a new search.

  31 citations