Interdisciplinary Machine Learning Methods for Particle Physics

Following the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle in the summer of 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the high-energy particle physics community has prioritized its thorough study. As part of a comprehensive plan to investigate the many combinations of production and decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson, this thesis describes a continued search for this particle produced in association with a leptonically-decaying vector boson (i.e. a W or Z boson) and decaying into a pair of tau leptons. In Run 1 at the LHC, ATLAS researchers were able to set an upper constraint on the signal strength of this process at μ = σ/σ_SM \u3c 5.6 with 95% confidence using 20.3 fb^-1 of collision data collected at a center-of-mass energy of √s = 8 TeV. My thesis work, which builds upon and extends the Run 1 analysis structure, takes advantage of an increased center-of-mass energy in Run 2 of the LHC of √s = 13 TeV as well as 139 fb^-1 of data, approximately seven times the amount used for the Run 1 analysis. While the higher center-of-mass energy in Run 2 yields a higher expected cross-section for this process, the analysis faces the additional challenges of two newly-considered final states, a higher number of simultaneous interactions per event, and a novel neural network-based background estimation technique. I also describe advanced machine learning techniques I have developed to support tau identification in the ATLAS High-Level Trigger as well as predicting and analyzing the dynamics of many-body systems such as 3D motion capture data of choreography

Fast Point Cloud Generation with Diffusion Models in High Energy Physics

Many particle physics datasets like those generated at colliders are described by continuous coordinates (in contrast to grid points like in an image), respect a number of symmetries (like permutation invariance), and have a stochastic dimensionality. For this reason, standard deep generative models that produce images or at least a fixed set of features are limiting. We introduce a new neural network simulation based on a diffusion model that addresses these limitations named Fast Point Cloud Diffusion (FPCD). We show that our approach can reproduce the complex properties of hadronic jets from proton-proton collisions with competitive precision to other recently proposed models. Additionally, we use a procedure called progressive distillation to accelerate the generation time of our method, which is typically a significant challenge for diffusion models despite their state-of-the-art precision.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Identifying Hadronically Decayed Tau Leptons at the High Luminosity LHC

We present a new algorithm that identifies reconstructed jets originating from hadronic decays of tau leptons against those from quarks or gluons. No tau lepton reconstruction algorithm is used. Instead, the algorithm represents jets as heterogeneous graphs with tracks and energy clusters as nodes and trains a Graph Neural Network to identify tau jets from other jets. Different attributed graph representations and different GNN architectures are explored. We propose to use differential track and energy cluster information as node features and a heterogeneous sequentially-biased encoding for the inputs to final graph-level classification.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

Interdisciplinary Machine Learning Methods for Particle Physics: The Search for the Higgs Boson Produced in Association with a Leptonically-Decaying Vector Boson and Decaying to a Tau Pair, Hadronic Tau Identification in the ATLAS High-Level Trigger, and Predictions of Many-Body System Dynamics

Following the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle in the summer of 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the high-energy particle physics community has prioritized its thorough study. As part of a comprehensive plan to investigate the many combinations of production and decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson, this thesis describes a continued search for this particle produced in association with a leptonically-decaying vector boson (i.e. a W or Z boson) and decaying into a pair of tau leptons. In Run 1 at the LHC, ATLAS researchers were able to set an upper constraint on the signal strength of this process at $\mu = \sigma/\sigma_{SM} < 5.6$ with 95\% confidence using 20.3 fb$^{-1}$ of collision data collected at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV. My thesis work, which builds upon and extends the Run 1 analysis structure, takes advantage of an increased center-of-mass energy in Run 2 of the LHC of $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV as well as 139 fb$^{-1}$ of data, approximately seven times the amount used for the Run 1 analysis. While the higher center-of-mass energy in Run 2 yields a higher expected cross-section for this process, the analysis faces the additional challenges of two newly-considered final states, a higher number of simultaneous interactions per event, and a novel neural network-based background estimation technique. I also describe advanced machine learning techniques I have developed to support tau identification in the ATLAS High-Level Trigger as well as predicting and analyzing the dynamics of many-body systems such as 3D motion capture data of choreography

Anomaly detection under coordinate transformations

There is a growing need for machine-learning-based anomaly detection strategies to broaden the search for beyond-the-Standard-Model physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and elsewhere. The first step of any anomaly detection approach is to specify observables and then use them to decide on a set of anomalous events. One common choice is to select events that have low probability density. It is a well-known fact that probability densities are not invariant under coordinate transformations, so the sensitivity can depend on the initial choice of coordinates. The broader machine learning community has recently connected coordinate sensitivity with anomaly detection and our goal is to bring awareness of this issue to the growing high-energy physics literature on anomaly detection. In addition to analytical explanations, we provide numerical examples from simple random variables and from the LHC Olympics dataset that show how using probability density as an anomaly score can lead to events being classified as anomalous or not depending on the coordinate frame

Anomaly Detection under Coordinate Transformations

There is a growing need for machine learning-based anomaly detection strategies to broaden the search for Beyond-the-Standard-Model (BSM) physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and elsewhere. The first step of any anomaly detection approach is to specify observables and then use them to decide on a set of anomalous events. One common choice is to select events that have low probability density. It is a well-known fact that probability densities are not invariant under coordinate transformations, so the sensitivity can depend on the initial choice of coordinates. The broader machine learning community has recently connected coordinate sensitivity with anomaly detection and our goal is to bring awareness of this issue to the growing high energy physics literature on anomaly detection. In addition to analytical explanations, we provide numerical examples from simple random variables and from the LHC Olympics Dataset that show how using probability density as an anomaly score can lead to events being classified as anomalous or not depending on the coordinate frame

Snowmass 2021 Computational Frontier CompF03 Topical Group Report: Machine Learning

The rapidly-developing intersection of machine learning (ML) with high-energy physics (HEP) presents both opportunities and challenges to our community. Far beyond applications of standard ML tools to HEP problems, genuinely new and potentially revolutionary approaches are being developed by a generation of talent literate in both fields. There is an urgent need to support the needs of the interdisciplinary community driving these developments, including funding dedicated research at the intersection of the two fields, investing in high-performance computing at universities and tailoring allocation policies to support this work, developing of community tools and standards, and providing education and career paths for young researchers attracted by the intellectual vitality of machine learning for high energy physics

Snowmass 2021 Computational Frontier CompF03 Topical Group Report: Machine Learning

The rapidly-developing intersection of machine learning (ML) with high-energy physics (HEP) presents both opportunities and challenges to our community. Far beyond applications of standard ML tools to HEP problems, genuinely new and potentially revolutionary approaches are being developed by a generation of talent literate in both fields. There is an urgent need to support the needs of the interdisciplinary community driving these developments, including funding dedicated research at the intersection of the two fields, investing in high-performance computing at universities and tailoring allocation policies to support this work, developing of community tools and standards, and providing education and career paths for young researchers attracted by the intellectual vitality of machine learning for high energy physics

Snowmass 2021 Computational Frontier CompF03 Topical Group Report: Machine Learning

The rapidly-developing intersection of machine learning (ML) with high-energy physics (HEP) presents both opportunities and challenges to our community. Far beyond applications of standard ML tools to HEP problems, genuinely new and potentially revolutionary approaches are being developed by a generation of talent literate in both fields. There is an urgent need to support the needs of the interdisciplinary community driving these developments, including funding dedicated research at the intersection of the two fields, investing in high-performance computing at universities and tailoring allocation policies to support this work, developing of community tools and standards, and providing education and career paths for young researchers attracted by the intellectual vitality of machine learning for high energy physics