arXiv subjects

Christof Roland

Publications and source records attributed to Christof Roland.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

TPCpp-10M: Simulated proton-proton collisions in a Time Projection Chamber for AI Foundation Models

Scientific foundation models hold great promise for advancing nuclear and particle physics by improving analysis precision and accelerating discovery. Yet, progress in this field is often limited by the lack of openly available large scale datasets, as well as standardized evaluation tasks and metrics. Furthermore, the specialized knowledge and software typically required to process particle physics data pose significant barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration with the broader machine learning community. This work introduces a large, openly accessible dataset of 10 million simulated proton-proton collisions, designed to support self-supervised training of foundation models. To facilitate ease of use, the dataset is provided in a common NumPy format. In addition, it includes 70,000 labeled examples spanning three well defined downstream tasks: track finding, particle identification, and noise tagging, to enable systematic evaluation of the foundation model's adaptability. The simulated data are generated using the Pythia Monte Carlo event generator at a center of mass energy of sqrt(s) = 200 GeV and processed with Geant4 to include realistic detector conditions and signal emulation in the sPHENIX Time Projection Chamber at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, located at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This dataset resource establishes a common ground for interdisciplinary research, enabling machine learning scientists and physicists alike to explore scaling behaviors, assess transferability, and accelerate progress toward foundation models in nuclear and high energy physics. The complete simulation and reconstruction chain is reproducible with the sPHENIX software stack. All data and code locations are provided under Data Accessibility.

physics.data-an↗

arXiv2021

Implementation of ACTS into sPHENIX track reconstruction

sPHENIX is a high energy nuclear physics experiment under construction at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The primary physics goals of sPHENIX are to study the quark-gluon-plasma, as well as the partonic structure of protons and nuclei, by measuring jets, their substructure, and heavy flavor hadrons in $p$$+$$p$, $p$+Au, and Au+Au collisions. sPHENIX will collect approximately 300 PB of data over three run periods, to be analyzed using available computing resources at BNL; thus, performing track reconstruction in a timely manner is a challenge due to the high occupancy of heavy ion collision events. The sPHENIX experiment has recently implemented the A Common Tracking Software (ACTS) track reconstruction toolkit with the goal of reconstructing tracks with high efficiency and within a computational budget of 5 seconds per minimum bias event. This paper reports the performance status of ACTS as the default track fitting tool within sPHENIX, including discussion of the first implementation of a time projection chamber geometry within ACTS.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2014

Heavy-ion physics studies for the Future Circular Collider

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) design study is aimed at assessing the physics potential and the technical feasibility of a new collider with centre-of-mass energies, in the hadron-hadron collision mode including proton and nucleus beams, more than seven-times larger than the nominal LHC energies. An electron-positron collider in the same tunnel is also considered as an intermediate step, which would provide the electron-hadron option in the long term. First ideas on the physics opportunities with heavy ions at the FCC are presented, covering the physics of Quark-Gluon Plasma, gluon saturation, photon-induced collisions, as well as connections with ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2011

Jet measurements by the CMS experiment in pp and PbPb collisions

The energy loss of fast partons traversing the strongly interacting matter produced in high-energy nuclear collisions is one of the most interesting observables to probe the nature of the produced medium. The multipurpose Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is well designed to measure these hard scattering processes with its high resolution calorimeters and high precision silicon tracker. Analyzing data from pp and PbPb collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV parton energy loss is observed as a significant imbalance of dijet transverse momentum. To gain further understanding of the parton energy loss mechanism the redistribution of the quenched jet energy was studied using the transverse momentum balance of charged tracks projected onto the direction of the leading jet. In contrast to pp collisions, a large fraction the momentum balance for asymmetric jets is found to be carried by low momentum particles at large angular distance to the jet axis. Further, the fragmentation functions for leading and subleading jets were reconstructed and were found to be unmodified compared to measurements in pp collisions. The results yield a detailed picture of parton propagation in the hot QCD medium.

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2009

Triggering on Hard Probes in Heavy-Ion Collisions with the CMS Experiment at the LHC

Studies of heavy-ion collisions at the LHC will benefit from an array of qualitatively new probes not readily available at lower collision energies. These include fully formed jets at ET > 50 GeV, Z0's and abundantly produced heavy flavors. For Pb+Pb running at LHC design luminosity, the collision rate in the CMS interaction region will exceed the available bandwidth to store data by several orders of magnitude. Therefore an efficient trigger strategy is needed to select the few percent of the incoming events containing the most interesting signatures. In this report, we will present the heavy-ion trigger strategy developed for the unique two-layer trigger system of the CMS experiment which consists of a ``Level-1'' trigger based on custom electronics and a High Level Trigger (HLT) implemented using a large cluster of commodity computers.

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2007

Simulation of Jet Quenching Observables in Heavy Ion Collisions at the LHC

Large transverse momentum jets provide unique tools to study dense QCD matter in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Results from RHIC on suppression of high transverse momentum particles in Au+Au collisions indicate a significant energy loss of leading partons in the dense and strongly interacting matter formed in these collisions. The LHC will collide Pb ions at sqrt(s_NN)=5500 GeV, where the cross section of hard scattering will increase dramatically. Large production rates, the large acceptance of the CMS calorimeters and tracking system, combined with the capability of triggering on jets, will extend the transverse momentum reach of charged particle spectra and nuclear modification factors up to p_T>200 GeV/c.

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2004

Heavy-Ion Physics at the LHC with the Compact Muon Solenoid Detector

Hadron collisions at the LHC offer a unique opportunity to study strong interactions. The exciting data collected by the four RHIC experiments suggest that in heavy-ion collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV, an equilibrated, strongly-coupled partonic system is formed. An extrapolation of the existing data toward LHC energies suggests that the heavy-ion program at the LHC is in a situation comparable to that of the high-energy program, where new discoveries near the TeV-scale are expected. Similarly, heavy-ion studies at the LHC are bound to either confirm the theoretical picture emerging from RHIC or challenge and extend our present understanding of strongly interacting matter at extreme densities. The experience at RHIC shows that the ideal detector for future heavy-ion studies should provide large acceptance for tracking and calorimetry, high granularity, high resolution and use fast detector technologies as well as sophisticated triggering. The CMS detector at the LHC excels in each of these categories.

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2004

Event-by-Event Fluctuations of Particle Ratios in Central Pb+Pb Collisions at 20 to 158 AGeV

In the vicinity of the QCD phase transition, critical fluctuations have been predicted to lead to non-statistical fluctuations of particle ratios, depending on the nature of the phase transition. Recent results of the NA49 energy scan program show a sharp maximum of the ratio of K+ to Pi+ yields in central Pb+Pb collisions at beam energies of 20-30 AGeV. This observation has been interpreted as an indication of a phase transition at low SPS energies. We present first results on event-by-event fluctuations of the kaon to pion and proton to pion ratios at beam energies close to this maximum.

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2002

Charged hadron transverse momentum distributions in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV

We present transverse momentum distributions of charged hadrons produced in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV. The evolution of the spectra for transverse momenta p_T from 0.25 to 5GeV/c is studied as a function of collision centrality over a range from 65 to 344 participating nucleons. We find a significant change of the spectral shape between proton-antiproton and peripheral Au+Au collisions. Comparing peripheral to central Au+Au collisions, we find that the yields at the highest p_T exhibit approximate scaling with the number of participating nucleons, rather than scaling with the number of binary collisions.

hep-ex↗