Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Hadronic footprint of GeV-mass dark matter

  Tilman Plehn, Peter Reimitz, Peter Richardson

  SciPost Phys. 8, 092 (2020) · published 24 June 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  GeV-scale dark matter is an increasingly attractive target for direct detection, indirect detection, and collider searches. Its annihilation into hadronic final states produces a challenging zoo of light hadronic resonances. We update Herwig7 to study the photon and positron spectra from annihilation through a vector mediator. It covers dark matter masses between 250 MeV and 5 GeV and includes an error estimate.

  12 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.

  33 citations

• Identifying hadronic charmonium decays in hadron colliders

  Nicolo de Groot, Sergi Castells

  SciPost Phys. Core 2, 008 (2020) · published 2 June 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Identification of charmonium states at hadron colliders has mostly been limited to leptonic decays of the J/{\psi}. In this paper we present and algorithm to identify hadronic decays of charmonium states (J/{\psi}, {\psi}(2S), \chi_{c0,1,2}) which make up the large majority of all decays. The algorithm is able to identify hadronic $J/\psi$ decays with an efficiency of 36\% while suppressing a background of quark and gluon jets by a factor 100.

  1 citation

• Fragmentation of two repelling Lund strings

  Cody B. Duncan, Peter Skands

  SciPost Phys. 8, 080 (2020) · published 19 May 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Motivated by recent discoveries of flow-like effects in pp collisions, and noting that multiple string systems can form and hadronize simultaneously in such collisions, we develop a simple model for the repulsive interaction between two Lund strings with a positive (colour-oriented) overlap in rapidity. The model is formulated in momentum space and is based on a postulate of a constant net transverse momentum being acquired per unit of overlap along a common rapidity direction. To conserve energy, the strings shrink in the longitudinal direction, essentially converting a portion of the string invariant mass $m^2$ into $p_\perp^2$ for constant $m_\perp^2 = m^2 + p_\perp^2$ for each string. The reduction in string invariant mass implies a reduced overall multiplicity of produced hadrons; the increase in $p_\perp^2$ is local and only affects hadrons in the overlapping region. Starting from the simplest case of two symmetric and parallel strings with massless endpoints, we generalize to progressively more complicated configurations. We present an implementation of this model in the Pythia event generator and use it to illustrate the effects on hadron $p_\perp$ distributions and dihadron azimuthal correlations, contrasting it with the current version of the "shoving" model implemented in the same generator.

  5 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

• Constraining the gauge-fixed Lagrangian in minimal Landau gauge

  Axel Maas

  SciPost Phys. 8, 071 (2020) · published 1 May 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A continuum formulation of gauge-fixing resolving the Gribov-Singer ambiguity remains a challenge. Finding a Lagrangian formulation of operational resolutions in numerical lattice calculations, like minimal Landau gauge, would be one possibility. Such a formulation will here be constrained by reconstructing the Dyson-Schwinger equation for which the lattice minimal-Landau-gauge ghost propagator is a solution. It is found that this requires an additional term. As a by-product new, high precision lattice results for the ghost-gluon vertex in three and four dimensions are obtained.

  12 citations

• How to GAN away detector effects

  Marco Bellagente, Anja Butter, Gregor Kasieczka, Tilman Plehn, Ramon Winterhalder

  SciPost Phys. 8, 070 (2020) · published 29 April 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  LHC analyses directly comparing data and simulated events bear the danger of using first-principle predictions only as a black-box part of event simulation. We show how simulations, for instance, of detector effects can instead be inverted using generative networks. This allows us to reconstruct parton level information from measured events. Our results illustrate how, in general, fully conditional generative networks can statistically invert Monte Carlo simulations. As a technical by-product we show how a maximum mean discrepancy loss can be staggered or cooled.

  58 citations

• Exploring phase space with Neural Importance Sampling

  Enrico Bothmann, Timo Janßen, Max Knobbe, Tobias Schmale, Steffen Schumann

  SciPost Phys. 8, 069 (2020) · published 29 April 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a novel approach for the integration of scattering cross sections and the generation of partonic event samples in high-energy physics. We propose an importance sampling technique capable of overcoming typical deficiencies of existing approaches by incorporating neural networks. The method guarantees full phase space coverage and the exact reproduction of the desired target distribution, in our case given by the squared transition matrix element. We study the performance of the algorithm for a few representative examples, including top-quark pair production and gluon scattering into three- and four-gluon final states.

  67 citations

• Multi-scale mining of kinematic distributions with wavelets

  Ben G. Lillard, Tilman Plehn, Alexis Romero, Tim M. P. Tait

  SciPost Phys. 8, 043 (2020) · published 17 March 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Typical LHC analyses search for local features in kinematic distributions. Assumptions about anomalous patterns limit them to a relatively narrow subset of possible signals. Wavelets extract information from an entire distribution and decompose it at all scales, simultaneously searching for features over a wide range of scales. We propose a systematic wavelet analysis and show how bumps, bump-dip combinations, and oscillatory patterns are extracted. Our kinematic wavelet analysis kit KWAK provides a publicly available framework to analyze and visualize general distributions.

  2 citations

• Properties of heavy mesons at finite temperature

  Gloria Montaña, Angels Ramos, Laura Tolós

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 3, 038 (2020) · published 26 February 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the properties of heavy mesons using a unitarized approach in a hot pionic medium, based on an effective hadronic theory. The interaction between the heavy mesons and pseudoscalar Goldstone bosons is described by a chiral Lagrangian at next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion and leading order in the heavy-quark mass expansion so as to satisfy heavy-quark spin symmetry. The meson-meson scattering problem in coupled channels with finite-temperature corrections is solved in a self-consistent manner. Our results show that the masses of the ground-state charmed mesons $D(0^-)$ and $D_s(1^-)$ decrease in a pionic environment at $T\neq 0$ and they acquire a substantial width. As a consequence, the behaviour of excited mesonic states (i.e. $D_{s0}^*(2317)^\pm$ and $D_0^*(2300)^{0,\pm}$), generated dynamically in our heavy-light molecular model, is also modified at $T\neq 0$. The aim is to test our results against Lattice QCD calculations in the future.