Events, processes, and the time of a killing

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defense of process ontology, relying instead on extant defenses. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it

Theory of decoherence due to scattering events and L\'evy processes

A general connection between the characteristic function of a L\'evy process and loss of coherence of the statistical operator describing the center of mass degrees of freedom of a quantum system interacting through momentum transfer events with an environment is established. The relationship with microphysical models and recent experiments is considered, focusing on the recently observed transition between a dynamics described by a compound Poisson process and a Gaussian process.Comment: 10 pages, revtex, no figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Hitting and returning into rare events for all alpha-mixing processes

We prove that for any $\alpha$-mixing stationnary process the hitting time of any $n$-string $A_n$ converges, when suitably normalized, to an exponential law. We identify the normalization constant $\lambda(A_n)$. A similar statement holds also for the return time. To establish this result we prove two other results of independent interest. First, we show a relation between the rescaled hitting time and the rescaled return time, generalizing a theorem by Haydn, Lacroix and Vaienti. Second, we show that for positive entropy systems, the probability of observing any $n$-string in $n$ consecutive observations, goes to zero as $n$ goes to infinity

Strong memoryless times and rare events in Markov renewal point processes

Let W be the number of points in (0,t] of a stationary finite-state Markov renewal point process. We derive a bound for the total variation distance between the distribution of W and a compound Poisson distribution. For any nonnegative random variable \zeta, we construct a ``strong memoryless time'' \hat \zeta such that \zeta-t is exponentially distributed conditional on {\hat \zeta\leq t, \zeta>t}, for each t. This is used to embed the Markov renewal point process into another such process whose state space contains a frequently observed state which represents loss of memory in the original process. We then write W as the accumulated reward of an embedded renewal reward process, and use a compound Poisson approximation error bound for this quantity by Erhardsson. For a renewal process, the bound depends in a simple way on the first two moments of the interrenewal time distribution, and on two constants obtained from the Radon-Nikodym derivative of the interrenewal time distribution with respect to an exponential distribution. For a Poisson process, the bound is 0.Comment: Published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org) in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/00911790400000005

Events with Isolated Charged Leptons and Large Missing Transverse Momentum at HERA

Striking events with isolated charged leptons, large missing transverse momentum and large transverse momentum of the hadronic final state were observed at the electron proton collider HERA in a data sample corresponding to a luminosity of about 130 pb-1. The H1 collaboration observed 11 events with isolated electrons or muons and with transverse momentum above 25 GeV. Only 3.4+-0.6 events were expected from Standard Model (SM) processes. Six of these events have a transverse momentum of greater than 40 GeV, while 1.3+-0.3 events were expected. The ZEUS collaboration observed good agreement with the SM. However, ZEUS found two events with a similar event topology, but tau leptons instead of electrons or muons in the final state. Only 0.2+-0.05 events were expected from SM processes. For various hypotheses the compatibility of the experimental results was investigated with respect to the SM and with respect to possible explanations beyond the SM. Prospects for the high-luminosity HERA-II data taking period are given

Event Generation and Statistical Sampling for Physics with Deep Generative Models and a Density Information Buffer

We present a study for the generation of events from a physical process with deep generative models. The simulation of physical processes requires not only the production of physical events, but also to ensure these events occur with the correct frequencies. We investigate the feasibility of learning the event generation and the frequency of occurrence with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to produce events like Monte Carlo generators. We study three processes: a simple two-body decay, the processes $e^+e^-\to Z \to l^+l^-$ and $p p \to t\bar{t}$ including the decay of the top quarks and a simulation of the detector response. We find that the tested GAN architectures and the standard VAE are not able to learn the distributions precisely. By buffering density information of encoded Monte Carlo events given the encoder of a VAE we are able to construct a prior for the sampling of new events from the decoder that yields distributions that are in very good agreement with real Monte Carlo events and are generated several orders of magnitude faster. Applications of this work include generic density estimation and sampling, targeted event generation via a principal component analysis of encoded ground truth data, anomaly detection and more efficient importance sampling, e.g. for the phase space integration of matrix elements in quantum field theories.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figure

Observation of Events with Isolated Charged Leptons and Large Missing Tra nsverse Momentum and of Events with Multi-Electrons at HERA

Striking events with isolated charged leptons, large missing transverse momentum and large transverse momentum of the hadronic final state (PTX) have been observed at the electron proton collider HERA. In the full HERA-I data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 130 invpb, the H1 experiment observes 10 events with isolated electrons or muons and with PTX >25 GeV. Only 2.9 pm 0.4 events are expected from Standard Model (SM) processes. Six of these events have PTX >40 GeV, while 1.1 pm 0.2 events are expected. The ZEUS experiment observes good agreement with the SM. However, in a preliminary search ZEUS has found two events with a similar event topology, but tau-leptons instead of electrons or muons in the final state . Only 0.12 pm 0.02 events are expected from SM processes. Moreover, six events with two or more electrons forming an invariant mass bigger than 100 GeV have been observed by the H1 experiment. Three events have two electrons and three events have three electrons, while only 0.25 events are expected in each case. The ZEUS measurement is in agreement with the SM expectation.Comment: talk given at 38th Recontres de Moriond Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories, Les Arc (France) 200