Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Probing proton structure at the Large Hadron electron Collider

  Rabah Abdul Khalek, Shaun Bailey, Jun Gao, Lucian Harland-Lang, Juan Rojo

  SciPost Phys. 7, 051 (2019) · published 17 October 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  For the foreseeable future, the exploration of the high-energy frontier will be the domain of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Of particular significance will be its high-luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC), which will operate until the mid-2030s. In this endeavour, for the full exploitation of the HL-LHC physics potential an improved understanding of the parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the proton is critical. The HL-LHC program would be uniquely complemented by the proposed Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC), a high-energy lepton-proton and lepton-nucleus collider based at CERN. In this work, we build on our recent PDF projections for the HL-LHC to assess the constraining power of the LHeC measurements of inclusive and heavy quark structure functions. We find that the impact of the LHeC would be significant, reducing PDF uncertainties by up to an order of magnitude in comparison to state-of-the-art global fits. In comparison to the HL-LHC projections, the PDF constraints from the LHeC are in general more significant for small and intermediate values of the momentum fraction x. At higher values of x, the impact of the LHeC and HL-LHC data is expected to be of a comparable size, with the HL-LHC constraints being more competitive in some cases, and the LHeC ones in others. Our results illustrate the encouraging complementarity of the HL-LHC and the LHeC in terms of charting the quark and gluon structure of the proton.

  15 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.

  6 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.

  23 citations

• Event generation with Sherpa 2.2

  Enrico Bothmann, Gurpreet Singh Chahal, Stefan Höche, Johannes Krause, Frank Krauss, Silvan Kuttimalai, Sebastian Liebschner, Davide Napoletano, Marek Schönherr, Holger Schulz, Steffen Schumann, Frank Siegert

  SciPost Phys. 7, 034 (2019) · published 18 September 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Sherpa is a general-purpose Monte Carlo event generator for the simulation of particle collisions in high-energy collider experiments. We summarize essential features and improvements of the Sherpa 2.2 release series, which is heavily used for event generation in the analysis and interpretation of LHC Run 1 and Run 2 data. We highlight a decade of developments towards ever higher precision in the simulation of particle-collision events.

  381 citations

• Anomalous dimensions of potential top-partners

  Diogo Buarque Franzosi, Gabriele Ferretti

  SciPost Phys. 7, 027 (2019) · published 4 September 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We discuss anomalous dimensions of top-partner candidates in theories of Partial Compositeness. First, we revisit, confirm and extend the computation by DeGrand and Shamir of anomalous dimensions of fermionic trilinears. We present general results applicable to all matter representations and to composite operators of any allowed spin. We then ask the question of whether it is reasonable to expect some models to have composite operators of sufficiently large anomalous dimension to serve as top-partners. While this question can be answered conclusively only by lattice gauge theory, within perturbation theory we find that such values could well occur for some specific models. In the Appendix we collect a number of practical group theory results for fourth-order invariants of general interest in gauge theories with many irreducible representations of fermions.

  22 citations

• Two-loop splitting in double parton distributions

  Markus Diehl, Jonathan R. Gaunt, Peter Ploessl, Andreas Schafer

  SciPost Phys. 7, 017 (2019) · published 6 August 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Double parton distributions (DPDs) receive a short-distance contribution from a single parton splitting to yield the two observed partons. We investigate this mechanism at next-to-leading order (NLO) in perturbation theory. Technically, we compute the two-loop matching of both the position and momentum space DPDs onto ordinary PDFs. This also yields the 1 -> 2 splitting functions appearing in the evolution of momentum-space DPDs at NLO. We give results for the unpolarised, colour-singlet DPDs in all partonic channels. These quantities are required for calculations of double parton scattering at full NLO. We discuss various kinematic limits of our results, and we verify that the 1 -> 2 splitting functions are consistent with the number and momentum sum rules for DPDs.

  16 citations

• The Machine Learning landscape of top taggers

  Gregor Kasieczka, Tilman Plehn, Anja Butter, Kyle Cranmer, Dipsikha Debnath, Barry M. Dillon, Malcolm Fairbairn, Darius A. Faroughy, Wojtek Fedorko, Christophe Gay, Loukas Gouskos, Jernej F. Kamenik, Patrick T. Komiske, Simon Leiss, Alison Lister, Sebastian Macaluso, Eric M. Metodiev, Liam Moore, Ben Nachman, Karl Nordström, Jannicke Pearkes, Huilin Qu, Yannik Rath, Marcel Rieger, David Shih, Jennifer M. Thompson, Sreedevi Varma

  SciPost Phys. 7, 014 (2019) · published 30 July 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Based on the established task of identifying boosted, hadronically decaying top quarks, we compare a wide range of modern machine learning approaches. Unlike most established methods they rely on low-level input, for instance calorimeter output. While their network architectures are vastly different, their performance is comparatively similar. In general, we find that these new approaches are extremely powerful and great fun.

  105 citations

• Quark-gluon tagging: Machine learning vs detector

  Gregor Kasieczka, Nicholas Kiefer, Tilman Plehn, Jennifer M. Thompson

  SciPost Phys. 6, 069 (2019) · published 18 June 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Distinguishing quarks from gluons based on low-level detector output is one of the most challenging applications of multi-variate and machine learning techniques at the LHC. We first show the performance of our 4-vector-based LoLa tagger without and after considering detector effects. We then discuss two benchmark applications, mono-jet searches with a gluon-rich signal and di-jet resonances with a quark-rich signal. In both cases an immediate benefit compared to the standard event-level analysis exists.

  40 citations

• First steps towards the reconstruction of the squark flavour structure

  Jordan Bernigaud, Björn Herrmann

  SciPost Phys. 6, 066 (2019) · published 11 June 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Assuming the observation of a squark at the Large Hadron Collider, we investigate methods to access its flavour content and thus gain information on the underlying flavour structure of the theory. Based on simple observables, we apply a likelihood inference method to determine the top-flavour content of the observed particle. In addition, we employ a multivariate analysis in order to classify different flavour hypotheses. Both methods are discussed within a simplified model and the more general Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model including most general squark mixing. We conclude that the likelihood inference may provide an estimation of the top-flavour content if additional knowledge, especially on the gaugino sector is available, while the multivariate analysis identifies different flavour patterns and can accommodate a more minimalistic set of observables.

  2 citations

• The Gauge-Higgs legacy of the LHC run II

  Anke Biekoetter, Tyler Corbett, Tilman Plehn

  SciPost Phys. 6, 064 (2019) · published 5 June 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a global analysis of the Higgs and electroweak sector based on LHC Run II and electroweak precision observables. We show which measurements provide the leading constraints on Higgs-related operators, and how the achieved LHC precision makes it necessary to combine rate measurements with electroweak precision observables. The SFitter framework allows us to include kinematic distributions beyond pre-defined ATLAS and CMS observables, independently study correlations, and avoid Gaussian assumptions for theory uncertainties. These Run II results are a step towards a precision physics program at the LHC, interpreted in terms of effective operators.

  72 citations