1–4 Jul 2024
Europe/Zurich timezone

Constructing model-agnostic likelihoods, a method for the reinterpretation of particle physics results

4 Jul 2024, 14:30
30m
"Standard talk" Plenary Session Thursday

Speaker

Lorenz Gärtner (LMU)

Description

Experimental High Energy Physics has entered an era of precision measurements. However, measurements of many of the accessible processes assume that the final states' underlying kinematic distribution is the same as the Standard Model prediction. This assumption introduces an implicit model-dependency into the measurement, rendering the reinterpretation of the experimental analysis complicated without reanalysing the underlying data.

We present a novel reweighting method in order to perform reinterpretation of particle physics measurements. It makes use of reweighting the Standard Model templates according to kinematic signal distributions of alternative theoretical models, prior to performing the statistical analysis. The generality of this method allows us to perform statistical inference in the space of theoretical parameters, assuming different kinematic distributions, according to a beyond Standard Model prediction.

The implementation - redist - is an extension to the pyhf software. It can easily be interfaced with the EOS software, which allows us to perform flavor physics phenomenology studies. Beyond the pyhf or HistFactory likelihood specification, only minimal information is necessary to make a likelihood model-agnostic and hence easily reinterpretable. We showcase that publishing such likelihoods is crucial for a full exploitation of experimental results.

Primary authors

Danny van Dyk Lorenz Gärtner (LMU) Lukas Alexander Heinrich (Technische Universitat Munchen (DE)) Malin Elisabeth Horstmann (Technische Universitat Munchen (DE)) Méril Reboud Nikolai Hartmann (Ludwig Maximilians Universitat (DE)) Slavomira Stefkova Thomas Kuhr (Ludwig Maximilians Universitat (DE))

Presentation materials