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Alison Lister

Publications and source records attributed to Alison Lister.

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Physics Prospects for a near-term Proton-Proton Collider

Hadron colliders at the energy frontier offer significant discovery potential through precise measurements of Standard Model processes and direct searches for new particles and interactions. A future hadron collider would enhance the exploration of particle physics at the electroweak scale and beyond, potentially uniting the community around a common project. The LHC has already demonstrated precision measurement and new physics search capabilities well beyond its original design goals and the HL-LHC will continue to usher in new advancements. This document highlights the physics potential of an FCC-hh machine to directly follow the HL-LHC. In order to reduce the timeline and costs, the physics impact of lower collider energies, down to $\sim 50$~TeV, is evaluated. Lower centre-of-mass energy could leverage advanced magnet technology to reduce both the cost and time to the next hadron collider. Such a machine offers a breadth of physics potential and would make key advancements in Higgs measurements, direct particle production searches, and high-energy tests of Standard Model processes. Most projected results from such a hadron-hadron collider are superior to or competitive with other proposed accelerator projects and this option offers unparalleled physics breadth. The FCC program should lay out a decision-making process that evaluates in detail options for proceeding directly to a hadron collider, including the possibility of reducing energy targets and staging the magnet installation to spread out the cost profile.

hep-ex

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with jet constituents for boosted top tagging at the LHC

Multivariate techniques based on engineered features have found wide adoption in the identification of jets resulting from hadronic top decays at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Recent Deep Learning developments in this area include the treatment of the calorimeter activation as an image or supplying a list of jet constituent momenta to a fully connected network. This latter approach lends itself well to the use of Recurrent Neural Networks. In this work the applicability of architectures incorporating Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks is explored. Several network architectures, methods of ordering of jet constituents, and input pre-processing are studied. The best performing LSTM network achieves a background rejection of 100 for 50% signal efficiency. This represents more than a factor of two improvement over a fully connected Deep Neural Network (DNN) trained on similar types of inputs.

hep-ex

Jet Constituents for Deep Neural Network Based Top Quark Tagging

Recent literature on deep neural networks for tagging of highly energetic jets resulting from top quark decays has focused on image based techniques or multivariate approaches using high-level jet substructure variables. Here, a sequential approach to this task is taken by using an ordered sequence of jet constituents as training inputs. Unlike the majority of previous approaches, this strategy does not result in a loss of information during pixelisation or the calculation of high level features. The jet classification method achieves a background rejection of 45 at a 50% efficiency operating point for reconstruction level jets with transverse momentum range of 600 to 2500 GeV and is insensitive to multiple proton-proton interactions at the levels expected throughout Run 2 of the LHC.

hep-ex

Searches for Massive tprime quarks decaying to W + q at the Tevatron

We present searches for pair-production of fourth generation tprime quarks in their decays to Wq. We analyse 4.6 fb-1 and 4.3 fb-1 of data collected by the CDF and D0 detectors, respectively, at the Fermilab Tevatron collider at a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt s = 1.96 TeV. We reconstruct the mass of the heavy quark and perform a two-dimensional-fit to the observed (HT, Mreco) distributions to discriminate the new physics signal from standard model backgrounds. As no significant excess of events is observed, we exclude a fourth-generation tprime quark with a mass below 335 (296) GeV at 95%CL at CDF (D0).

hep-ex

The CDF L2 XFT Trigger Upgrade

We briefly present the eXtremely Fast Tracker stereo track upgrade for the CDF Level 2 trigger system. This upgrade enabled full 3D track reconstruction at Level 2 of the 3-Level CDF online triggering system. Using information provided by the stereo layers of the Central Outer Tracker, we can decrease the trigger rate due to fake tracks by requiring the tracks to be consistent with a single vertex in all three dimensions but also by using the track information to "point" to the various detector components. We will also discuss the effectiveness of the Level 2 stereo track algorithm at achieving reduced trigger rates with high efficiencies during high luminosity running.

physics.ins-det

Search for Heavy Top-like Quarks tprime->Wq Using Lepton Plus Jets Events in 1.96 TeV p-pbar Collisions

We present the results of a search for a new heavy top-like quark, tprime, decaying to a W boson and another quark using the CDF II Detector in Run II of the Tevatron ppbar collider. New top-like quarks are predicted in a number of models of new physics. Using a data sample corresponding to 2.8 fb-1 of integrated luminosity we fit the observed spectrum of total transverse energy and reconstructed quark mass to a combination of background plus signal. We see no evidence for tprime production, so use this result to set limits on the tprime tprimebar production cross section times the branching ratio of tprime to Wq and infer a lower limit of 311 GeV/c2 on the mass of the tprime at 95% CL.

hep-ex

Top Quark Pair Production Cross Section and Forward-Backward Asymmetry at the Tevatron

We present recent results on top quark pair production cross section and forward-backward asymmetry at the Tevatron. Three new cross section measurements from CDF and one new measurement from DO are presented that utilize the full dataset available. A new DO top cross section combination gives a ttbar production cross section of sigma_ttbar = 7.83 + 0.46-0.45 (stat) + 0.64-0.53 (syst) +-0.48 (lumi). The new CDF cross section combination for ttbar production is found to be 7.0 +- 0.3 (stat) +- 0.4 (syst) +- 0.4 (lumi) pb giving a total uncertainty of 9%, very close to the that of the current best theoretical predictions. It is important to measure the top cross section in as many different channels as possible and investigate their compatibility. This is useful as new physics might show up differently in the different channels. Thus any significant discrepancy could be a sign of new physics. Three new measurements of the forward-backward asymmetry are also presented. The two CDF measurements unfold the observed asymmetry back to parton level in order to directly compare the values obtained with theoretical predictions. The DO measurement is not unfolded and therefore does not depend on the specific method used for unfolding.

hep-ex