Physics-informed continuous normalizing flows to learn the electric field within a time-projection chamber
Abstract
Accurate position reconstruction in noble-element time-projection chambers (TPCs) is critical for rare-event searches in astroparticle physics, yet is systematically limited by electric field distortions arising from charge accumulation on detector surfaces. Conventional data-driven field corrections suffer from three fundamental limitations: discretization artifacts that break smoothness and differentiability, lack of guaranteed consistency with Maxwell's equations, and statistical requirements of calibration events. We introduce a physics-informed continuous normalizing flow architecture that learns the electric field transformation directly from calibration data while enforcing the constraint of field conservativity through the model structure itself. Applied to simulated Kr calibration data in an XLZD-like dual-phase xenon TPC, our method achieves superior reconstruction accuracy compared to histogram-based corrections when trained on identical datasets, demonstrating viable performance with only eventsan order of magnitude reduction in calibration requirements. This approach enables practical monthly field monitoring campaigns, propagation of position uncertainties through differentiable transformations, and enhanced background discrimination in next-generation rare-event searches.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.01897,
title = {Physics-informed continuous normalizing flows to learn the electric field within a time-projection chamber},
author = {Ivy Li and Peter Gaemers and Juehang Qin and Naija Bruckner and Maris Arthurs and Maria Elena Monzani and Christopher Tunnell},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.01897},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
20 pages, 9 figures, 3 appendices