Related papers: Biased rate estimates in bump-hunt searches
The oldest and most robust technique to search for new particles is to look for `bumps' in invariant mass spectra over smoothly falling backgrounds. We present a new extension of the bump hunt that naturally benefits from modern machine…
We demonstrate that a purposefully normalised NNLO top pair invariant mass differential spectrum can have very small theoretical uncertainty and, in particular, a small sensitivity to the top quark mass. Such observable can thus be a very…
In high Energy Physics, it is common to look for a localized deviation in data with respect to a given reference. For this task, the well known BumpHunter algorithm allows for a model-independent deviation search with the advantage of…
The LHC experiments have great potential in discovering many possible new particles up to the TeV scale. The significance calculation of an observation of a physics signal with known location and shape is no longer valid when either the…
Contrary to the general trend of looking for new physics at energies beyond the current reach of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this article proposes a strategy to look for light new physics via a meticulous study of well known and…
Physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) has yet to be observed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), motivating the development of model-agnostic, machine learning-based strategies to probe more regions of the phase space. As many final…
Despite extensive theoretical motivation for physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have found no significant evidence for BSM physics. Therefore, it is essential to broaden…
A method to search for particles of unknown masses in final states with two invisible particles is presented. Searching for final states with missing energy is a challenging task usually performed in the tail of a missing energy related…
Anomaly detection is a key application of machine learning, but is generally focused on the detection of outlying samples in the low probability density regions of data. Here we instead present and motivate a method for unsupervised…
The standard in the high energy physics community for claiming discovery of new physics is a $5\sigma$ excess in the observed signal over the estimated background. While a $3\sigma$ excess is not enough to claim discovery, it is certainly…
Model-independent searches in particle physics aim at completing our knowledge of the universe by looking for new possible particles not predicted by the current theories. Such particles, referred to as signal, are expected to behave as a…
We suggest a method for statistical tests which does not suffer from a posteriori manipulations with tested samples (e.g. cuts optimization) and does not require a somewhat obscure procedure of the penalty estimate. The idea of the method…
The ATLAS and CMS experiments at LHC have great physics potential in discovering many possible new particles, from Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson to supersymmetric (SUSY) and other beyond the SM new particles over a very large mass range…
The identification of peaks or maxima in probability densities, by mode testing or bump hunting, has become an important problem in applied fields. This task has been approached in the statistical literature from different perspectives,…
Machine-learning techniques have become fundamental in high-energy physics and, for new physics searches, it is crucial to know their performance in terms of experimental sensitivity, understood as the statistical significance of the…
The search for resonant mass bumps in invariant-mass distributions remains a cornerstone strategy for uncovering Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Traditional methods often rely on predefined…
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…
If supersymmetry exists at the electroweak scale, then it should be discovered at the LHC. Determining masses, of supersymmetric particles however, is more difficult. In this paper, methods are discussed to determine combinations of masses…
Particle physics experiments such as those run in the Large Hadron Collider result in huge quantities of data, which are boiled down to a few numbers from which it is hoped that a signal will be detected. We discuss a simple probability…
Because the emphasis of the LHC is on 5 sigma discoveries and the LHC environment induces high systematic errors, many of the common statistical procedures used in High Energy Physics are not adequate. I review the basic ingredients of LHC…