Learning to find weird particles

Tuesday 13 May 2025, 15:00 → 16:00 US/Central

WH11NE(Sunrise)

15:00 → 16:00 Learning to find weird particles

Finding the tracks that particles make through detectors is a critical component of identifying new physics and phenomena,  but is very a challenging combinatorial problem. Traditionally, track finding codes assume that tracks must be helical, which simplifies the task  but also restricts power to discover new physics which might produce non-helical tracks, effectively ignoring some potentially striking signatures.  However, recent advances in ML-based tracking allow for new inroads into previously inaccessible territory, such as efficient reconstruction of tracks that do not follow helical trajectories. I will present a demonstration of training a network to reconstruct a particular type of non-helical tracks, quirks, and discuss the potential to generalize ML tracking to a wider class of non-helical tracks, enabling a search for overlooked anomalous tracks.  I’ll end by talking briefly about my experience in science communication.

Speaker: Daniel Whiteson (University of California Irvine (US))