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David Miller

Publications and source records attributed to David Miller.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2016

A Letter of Intent to Install a milli-charged Particle Detector at LHC P5

In this LOI we propose a dedicated experiment that would detect "milli-charged" particles produced by pp collisions at LHC Point 5. The experiment would be installed during LS2 in the vestigial drainage gallery above UXC and would not interfere with CMS operations. With 300 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity, sensitivity to a particle with charge $\mathcal{O}(10^{-3})~e$ can be achieved for masses of $\mathcal{O}(1)$ GeV, and charge $\mathcal{O}(10^{-2})~e$ for masses of $\mathcal{O}(10)$ GeV, greatly extending the parameter space explored for particles with small charge and masses above 100 MeV.

physics.ins-det↗
arXiv2016

W+W- + jet: compact analytic results

In the second run of the LHC, which started in April 2015, an accurate understanding of Standard Model processes is more crucial than ever. Processes including electroweak gauge bosons serve as standard candles for SM measurements, and equally constitute important background for BSM searches. We here present the NLO QCD virtual contributions to W+W- + jet in an analytic format obtained through unitarity methods and show results for the full process using an implementation into the Monte Carlo event generator MCFM. Phenomenologically, we investigate total as well as differential cross sections for the LHC with 14 TeV center-of-mass energy, as well as a future 100 TeV proton-proton machine. In the format presented here, the one-loop virtual contributions also serve as important ingredients in the calculation of W+W- pair production at NNLO.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2015

Impartial Redistricting: A Markov Chain Approach

The gerrymandering problem is a worldwide problem which sets great threat to democracy and justice in district based elections. Thanks to partisan redistricting commissions, district boundaries are often manipulated to benefit incumbents. Since an independent commission is hard to come by, the possibility of impartially generating districts with a computer is explored in this thesis. We have developed an algorithm to randomly produce legal redistricting schemes for Pennsylvania.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2015

Space Warps II. New Gravitational Lens Candidates from the CFHTLS Discovered through Citizen Science

We report the discovery of 29 promising (and 59 total) new lens candidates from the CFHT Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) based on about 11 million classifications performed by citizen scientists as part of the first Space Warps lens search. The goal of the blind lens search was to identify lens candidates missed by robots (the RingFinder on galaxy scales and ArcFinder on group/cluster scales) which had been previously used to mine the CFHTLS for lenses. We compare some properties of the samples detected by these algorithms to the Space Warps sample and find them to be broadly similar. The image separation distribution calculated from the Space Warps sample shows that previous constraints on the average density profile of lens galaxies are robust. SpaceWarps recovers about 65% of known lenses, while the new candidates show a richer variety compared to those found by the two robots. This detection rate could be increased to 80% by only using classifications performed by expert volunteers (albeit at the cost of a lower purity), indicating that the training and performance calibration of the citizen scientists is very important for the success of Space Warps. In this work we present the SIMCT pipeline, used for generating in situ a sample of realistic simulated lensed images. This training sample, along with the false positives identified during the search, has a legacy value for testing future lens finding algorithms. We make the pipeline and the training set publicly available.

astro-ph.CO↗
arXiv2015

Space Warps: I. Crowd-sourcing the Discovery of Gravitational Lenses

We describe Space Warps, a novel gravitational lens discovery service that yields samples of high purity and completeness through crowd-sourced visual inspection. Carefully produced colour composite images are displayed to volunteers via a web- based classification interface, which records their estimates of the positions of candidate lensed features. Images of simulated lenses, as well as real images which lack lenses, are inserted into the image stream at random intervals; this training set is used to give the volunteers instantaneous feedback on their performance, as well as to calibrate a model of the system that provides dynamical updates to the probability that a classified image contains a lens. Low probability systems are retired from the site periodically, concentrating the sample towards a set of lens candidates. Having divided 160 square degrees of Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) imaging into some 430,000 overlapping 82 by 82 arcsecond tiles and displaying them on the site, we were joined by around 37,000 volunteers who contributed 11 million image classifications over the course of 8 months. This Stage 1 search reduced the sample to 3381 images containing candidates; these were then refined in Stage 2 to yield a sample that we expect to be over 90% complete and 30% pure, based on our analysis of the volunteers performance on training images. We comment on the scalability of the SpaceWarps system to the wide field survey era, based on our projection that searches of 10$^5$ images could be performed by a crowd of 10$^5$ volunteers in 6 days.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2012

Status of MUSIC, the MUltiwavelength Sub/millimeter Inductance Camera

We present the status of MUSIC, the MUltiwavelength Sub/millimeter Inductance Camera, a new instrument for the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. MUSIC is designed to have a 14', diffraction-limited field-of-view instrumented with 2304 detectors in 576 spatial pixels and four spectral bands at 0.87, 1.04, 1.33, and 1.98 mm. MUSIC will be used to study dusty star-forming galaxies, galaxy clusters via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, and star formation in our own and nearby galaxies. MUSIC uses broadband superconducting phased-array slot-dipole antennas to form beams, lumped-element on-chip bandpass filters to define spectral bands, and microwave kinetic inductance detectors to senseincoming light. The focal plane is fabricated in 8 tiles consisting of 72 spatial pixels each. It is coupled to the telescope via an ambient temperature ellipsoidal mirror and a cold reimaging lens. A cold Lyot stop sits at the image of the primary mirror formed by the ellipsoidal mirror. Dielectric and metal mesh filters are used to block thermal infrared and out-of-band radiation. The instrument uses a pulse tube cooler and 3He/3He/4He closed-cycle cooler to cool the focal plane to below 250 mK. A multilayer shield attenuates Earth's magnetic field. Each focal plane tile is read out by a single pair of coaxes and a HEMT amplifier. The readout system consists of 16 copies of custom-designed ADC/DAC and IF boards coupled to the CASPER ROACH platform. We focus on recent updates on the instrument design and results from the commissioning of the full camera in 2012.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2010

Spectrum and Heat Kernel Asymptotics on General Laakso Spaces

We introduce a method of constructing a general Laakso space while calculating the spectrum and multiplicities of the Laplacian operator on it. Using this information, we found the leading term of the trace of the heat kernel of a Laakso space and its spectral dimension.

math.CA↗
arXiv1999

Subspaces of Knot Spaces

The inclusion of the space of all knots of a prescribed writhe in a particular isotopy class into the space of all knots in that isotopy class is a weak homotopy equivalence.

math.GT↗