arXiv subjects

Andy Buckley

Publications and source records attributed to Andy Buckley.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Data and Analysis Preservation, Recasting, and Reinterpretation

We make the case for the systematic, reliable preservation of event-wise data, derived data products, and executable analysis code. This preservation enables the analyses' long-term future reuse, in order to maximise the scientific impact of publicly funded particle-physics experiments. We cover the needs of both the experimental and theoretical particle physics communities, and outline the goals and benefits that are uniquely enabled by analysis recasting and reinterpretation. We also discuss technical challenges and infrastructure needs, as well as sociological challenges and changes, and give summary recommendations to the particle-physics community.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2022

Colouring the Higgs boson

The jet colour ring is a novel colour tagger observable designed to separate the decay of a colour-singlet into two jets from a two-jet background in a different colour configuration. Simulation studies in the case of the production of a boosted Higgs boson decaying in two b-quarks and an associate electroweak boson, showed notable discriminator powers when comparing the jet colour ring performances with other observables. These results are opening a wide scenario for further studies.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2021

HL-LHC Computing Review Stage-2, Common Software Projects: Event Generators

This paper has been prepared by the HEP Software Foundation (HSF) Physics Event Generator Working Group (WG), as an input to the second phase of the LHCC review of High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) computing, which is due to take place in November 2021. It complements previous documents prepared by the WG in the context of the first phase of the LHCC review in 2020, including in particular the WG paper on the specific challenges in Monte Carlo event generator software for HL-LHC, which has since been updated and published, and which we are also submitting to the November 2021 review as an integral part of our contribution.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2021

Challenges in Monte Carlo event generator software for High-Luminosity LHC

We review the main software and computing challenges for the Monte Carlo physics event generators used by the LHC experiments, in view of the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) physics programme. This paper has been prepared by the HEP Software Foundation (HSF) Physics Event Generator Working Group as an input to the LHCC review of HL-LHC computing, which has started in May 2020.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

$\textsf{Xsec}$: the cross-section evaluation code

The evaluation of higher-order cross-sections is an important component in the search for new physics, both at hadron colliders and elsewhere. For most new physics processes of interest, total cross-sections are known at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the strong coupling $α_s$, and often beyond, via either higher-order terms at fixed powers of $α_s$, or multi-emission resummation. However, the computation time for such higher-order cross-sections is prohibitively expensive, and precludes efficient evaluation in parameter-space scans beyond two dimensions. Here we describe the software tool $\textsf{xsec}$, which allows for fast evaluation of cross-sections based on the use of machine-learning regression, using distributed Gaussian processes trained on a pre-generated sample of parameter points. This first version of the code provides all NLO Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model strong-production cross-sections at the LHC, for individual flavour final states, evaluated in a fraction of a second. Moreover, it calculates regression errors, as well as estimates of errors from higher-order contributions, from uncertainties in the parton distribution functions, and from the value of $α_s$. While we focus on a specific phenomenological model of supersymmetry, the method readily generalises to any process where it is possible to generate a sufficient training sample.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Self-consistent approach for measuring the energy spectra and composition of cosmic rays and determining the properties of hadronic interactions at high energy

Air showers, produced by the interaction of energetic cosmic rays with the atmosphere, are an excellent alternative to study particle physics at energies beyond any human-made particle accelerator. For that, it is necessary to identify first the mass composition of the primary cosmic ray (and its energy). None of the existing high energy interaction models have been able to reproduce coherently all air shower observables over the entire energy and zenith angle phase space. This is despite having tried all possible combinations for the cosmic ray mass composition. This proposal outlines a self-consistent strategy to study high energy particle interactions and identify the energy spectra and mass composition of cosmic rays. This strategy involves the participation of different particle accelerators and astrophysics experiments. This is important to cover the entire cosmic ray energy range and a larger phase-space of shower observables to probe the high energy interaction models.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2020

HL-LHC Computing Review: Common Tools and Community Software

Common and community software packages, such as ROOT, Geant4 and event generators have been a key part of the LHC's success so far and continued development and optimisation will be critical in the future. The challenges are driven by an ambitious physics programme, notably the LHC accelerator upgrade to high-luminosity, HL-LHC, and the corresponding detector upgrades of ATLAS and CMS. In this document we address the issues for software that is used in multiple experiments (usually even more widely than ATLAS and CMS) and maintained by teams of developers who are either not linked to a particular experiment or who contribute to common software within the context of their experiment activity. We also give space to general considerations for future software and projects that tackle upcoming challenges, no matter who writes it, which is an area where community convergence on best practice is extremely useful.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2020

An Optimal Observable for Color Singlet Identification

We present a novel approach to construct a color tagger, i.e. an observable that is able to discriminate the decay of a color-singlet into two jets from a two-jet background in a different color configuration. We do this by explicitly taking the ratio of the corresponding leading-order matrix elements in the soft limit, thus obtaining an observable that is provably optimal within our approximation. We call this observable the "jet color ring" and we compare its performance to other color-sensitive observables such as jet pull and dipolarity. We also assess the performance of the jet color ring in simulations by applying it to the case of the hadronic decays of a boosted Higgs boson and of an electroweak boson.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

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

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.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Confronting Experimental Data with Heavy-Ion Models: Rivet for Heavy Ions

The Rivet library is an important toolkit in particle physics, and serves as a repository for analysis data and code. It allows for comparisons between data and theoretical calculations of the final state of collision events. This paper outlines several recent additions and improvements to the framework to include support for analysis of heavy ion collision simulated data. The paper also presents examples of these recent developments and their applicability in implementing concrete physics analyses.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Technical Proposal: FASERnu

FASERnu is a proposed small and inexpensive emulsion detector designed to detect collider neutrinos for the first time and study their properties. FASERnu will be located directly in front of FASER, 480 m from the ATLAS interaction point along the beam collision axis in the unused service tunnel TI12. From 2021-23 during Run 3 of the 14 TeV LHC, roughly 1,300 electron neutrinos, 20,000 muon neutrinos, and 20 tau neutrinos will interact in FASERnu with TeV-scale energies. With the ability to observe these interactions, reconstruct their energies, and distinguish flavors, FASERnu will probe the production, propagation, and interactions of neutrinos at the highest human-made energies ever recorded. The FASERnu detector will be composed of 1000 emulsion layers interleaved with tungsten plates. The total volume of the emulsion and tungsten is 25cm x 25cm x 1.35m, and the tungsten target mass is 1.2 tonnes. From 2021-23, 7 sets of emulsion layers will be installed, with replacement roughly every 20-50 1/fb in planned Technical Stops. In this document, we summarize FASERnu's physics goals and discuss the estimates of neutrino flux and interaction rates. We then describe the FASERnu detector in detail, including plans for assembly, transport, installation, and emulsion replacement, and procedures for emulsion readout and analyzing the data. We close with cost estimates for the detector components and infrastructure work and a timeline for the experiment.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2019

Fast simulation of detector effects in Rivet

We describe the design and implementation of detector-bias emulation in the Rivet MC event analysis system. Implemented using C++ efficiency and kinematic smearing functors, it allows detector effects to be specified within an analysis routine, customised to the exact phase-space and reconstruction working points of the analysis. A set of standard detector functions for the physics objects of Runs 1 and 2 of the ATLAS and CMS experiments is also provided. Finally, as jet substructure is an important class of physics observable usually considered to require an explicit detector simulation, we demonstrate that a smearing approach, tuned to available substructure data and implemented in Rivet, can accurately reproduce jet-structure biases observed by ATLAS.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

The HepMC3 Event Record Library for Monte Carlo Event Generators

In high-energy physics, Monte Carlo event generators (MCEGs) are used to simulate the interactions of high energy particles. MCEG event records store the information on the simulated particles and their relationships, and thus reflects the simulated evolution of physics phenomena in each collision event. We present the HepMC3 library, a next-generation framework for MCEG event record encoding and manipulation, which builds on the functionality of its widely-used predecessors to enable more sophisticated algorithms for event-record analysis. By comparison to previous versions, the event record structure has been simplified, while adding the possibility to encode arbitrary information. The I/O functionality has been extended to support common input and output formats of various HEP MCEGs, including formats used in Fortran MCEGs, the formats established by the HepMC2 library, and binary formats such as ROOT; custom input or output handlers may also be used. HepMC3 is already supported by popular modern MCEGs and can replace the older HepMC versions in many others.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

Computational challenges for MC event generation

The sophistication of fully exclusive MC event generation has grown at an extraordinary rate since the start of the LHC era, but has been mirrored by a similarly extraordinary rise in the CPU cost of state-of-the-art MC calculations. The reliance of experimental analyses on these calculations raises the disturbing spectre of MC computations being a leading limitation on the physics impact of the HL-LHC, with MC trends showing more signs of further cost-increases rather than the desired speed-ups. I review the methods and bottlenecks in MC computation, and areas where new computing architectures, machine-learning methods, and social structures may help to avert calamity.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

Proposal for the validation of Monte Carlo implementations of the standard model effective field theory

We propose a procedure to cross-validate Monte Carlo implementations of the standard model effective field theory. It is based on the numerical comparison of squared amplitudes computed at specific phase-space and parameter points in pairs of implementations. Interactions are fully linearised in the effective field theory expansion. The squares of linear effective field theory amplitudes and their interference with standard-model contributions are compared separately. Such pairwise comparisons are primarily performed at tree level and a possible extension to the one-loop level is also briefly considered. We list the current standard model effective field theory implementations and the comparisons performed to date.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

Combined collider constraints on neutralinos and charginos

Searches for supersymmetric electroweakinos have entered a crucial phase, as the integrated luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider is now high enough to compensate for their weak production cross-sections. Working in a framework where the neutralinos and charginos are the only light sparticles in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, we use gambit to perform a detailed likelihood analysis of the electroweakino sector. We focus on the impacts of recent ATLAS and CMS searches with 36 fb$^{-1}$ of 13 TeV proton-proton collision data. We also include constraints from LEP and invisible decays of the $Z$ and Higgs bosons. Under the background-only hypothesis, we show that current LHC searches do not robustly exclude any range of neutralino or chargino masses. However, a pattern of excesses in several LHC analyses points towards a possible signal, with neutralino masses of $(m_{\tildeχ_1^0}, m_{\tildeχ_2^0}, m_{\tildeχ_3^0}, m_{\tildeχ_4^0})$ = (8-155, 103-260, 130-473, 219-502) GeV and chargino masses of $(m_{\tildeχ_1^{\pm}}, m_{\tildeχ_2^{\pm}})$ = (104-259, 224-507) GeV at the 95% confidence level. The lightest neutralino is mostly bino, with a possible modest Higgsino or wino component. We find that this excess has a combined local significance of $3.3σ$, subject to a number of cautions. If one includes LHC searches for charginos and neutralinos conducted with 8 TeV proton-proton collision data, the local significance is lowered to 2.9$σ$. We briefly consider the implications for dark matter, finding that the correct relic density can be obtained through the Higgs-funnel and $Z$-funnel mechanisms, even assuming that all other sparticles are decoupled. All samples, gambit input files and best-fit models from this study are available on Zenodo.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

The Simplified Likelihood Framework

We discuss the simplified likelihood framework as a systematic approximation scheme for experimental likelihoods such as those originating from LHC experiments. We develop the simplified likelihood from the Central Limit Theorem keeping the next-to-leading term in the large $N$ expansion to correctly account for asymmetries. Moreover, we present an efficient method to compute the parameters of the simplified likelihood from Monte Carlo simulations. The approach is validated using a realistic LHC-like analysis, and the limits of the approximation are explored. Finally, we discuss how the simplified likelihood data can be conveniently released in the HepData error source format and automatically built from it, making this framework a convenient tool to transmit realistic experimental likelihoods to the community.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

ColliderBit: a GAMBIT module for the calculation of high-energy collider observables and likelihoods

We describe ColliderBit, a new code for the calculation of high energy collider observables in theories of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). ColliderBit features a generic interface to BSM models, a unique parallelised Monte Carlo event generation scheme suitable for large-scale supercomputer applications, and a number of LHC analyses, covering a reasonable range of the BSM signatures currently sought by ATLAS and CMS. ColliderBit also calculates likelihoods for Higgs sector observables, and LEP searches for BSM particles. These features are provided by a combination of new code unique to ColliderBit, and interfaces to existing state-of-the-art public codes. ColliderBit is both an important part of the GAMBIT framework for BSM inference, and a standalone tool for efficiently applying collider constraints to theories of new physics.

hep-ph↗