Related papers: Statistical Issues in Searches for New Physics
A central goal in experimental high energy physics is to detect new physics signals that are not explained by known physics. In this paper, we aim to search for new signals that appear as deviations from known Standard Model physics in…
I sketch some pressing questions in several active areas of particle physics and outline the challenges they present for the design and operation of detectors.
We discuss several ways of illustrating fundamental concepts in statistical and thermal physics by considering various models and algorithms. We emphasize the importance of replacing students' incomplete mental images by models that are…
Statistical mechanics relies on the complete though probabilistic description of a system in terms of all the microscopic variables. Its object is to derive therefrom static and dynamic properties involving some reduced set of variables.…
How can we search for new physics when we only vaguely know what it should look like? How can we perform an unbiased yet data-driven search? If we see apparently anomalous events in our data, how can we quantify their "interestingness" a…
For the field of high energy physics to continue to have a bright future, priority within the field must be given to investments in the development of both evolutionary and transformational detector development that is coordinated across…
The statistical physics approach to the number partioning problem, a classical NP-hard problem, is both simple and rewarding. Very basic notions and methods from statistical mechanics are enough to obtain analytical results for the phase…
We describe a statistical hypothesis test for the presence of a signal. The test allows the researcher to fix the signal location and/or width a priori, or perform a search to find the signal region that maximizes the signal. The background…
Model-independent search strategies have been increasingly proposed in recent years because on the one hand there has been no clear signal for new physics and on the other hand there is a lack of a highly probable and parameter-free…
Associated with the cosmic acceleration are the old and new cosmological constant problems, recently put into the more general context of the dark energy problem. In broad terms, the old problem is related to an unexpected order of…
Lectures presented at the 1st CERN Asia-Europe-Pacific School of High-Energy Physics, Fukuoka, Japan, 14-27 October 2012. A pedagogical selection of topics in probability and statistics is presented. Choice and emphasis are driven by the…
In view of the absence of any direct sign of New Physics (NP) at the LHC, the precise investigation of the Higgs properties becomes more and more important in our quest for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). Coupling measurements play…
It is clear that conventional statistical inference protocols need to be revised to deal correctly with the high-dimensional data that are now common. Most recent studies aimed at achieving this revision rely on powerful approximation…
In a statistical analysis in Particle Physics, nuisance parameters can be introduced to take into account various types of systematic uncertainties. The best estimate of such a parameter is often modeled as a Gaussian distributed variable…
For high dimensional data, some of the standard statistical techniques do not work well. So modification or further development of statistical methods are necessary. In this paper, we explore these modifications. We start with the important…
We propose a rigorous and effective way to compare experimental and theoretical histograms, incorporating the different sources of statistical and systematic uncertainties. This is a useful tool to extract as much information as possible…
Non-linear effects in accelerator physics are important for both successful operation of accelerators and during the design stage. Since both of these aspects are closely related, they will be treated together in this overview. Some of the…
This chapter seeks to outline a few basic problems in quantum statistical physics where recent experimental advances from the atomic physics community offer the hope of dramatic progress. The focus is on nonequilibrium situations where the…
In particle physics and cosmology, distinguishing subtle new physics signals from established backgrounds is a fundamental and persistent challenge for phenomenologists. This paper discuss a simple and robust statistical framework to…
An introduction to spin techniques in particle physics is given. Among the topics covered are: helicity formalism and its applications to the decay and scattering of spin-1/2 and spin-1 particles, techniques for evaluating helicity…