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experimental particle physicists

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Self-supervised model improves identification of heavy-flavour decays at lhcb

"Transforming" LHCb: self-supervised maps of heavy-flavour decays

Abstract: Decays of beauty and charm hadrons provide sensitive probes of physics beyond the standard model, including decays with invisible particles, in which part of the final state leaves no reconstructed detector signature. The large heavy-flavour data samples recorded by the LHCb experiment at the CERN LHC, together with its precise tracking, displaced vertex reconstruction, and particle identification, make it particularly well suited to learning a map of reconstructed heavy-hadron decay environments directly from data. We propose to bring recent advances in jet flavour tagging at ATLAS and CMS to significantly improve on the performance of the current LHCb taggers and extend them to the reconstruction of heavy-flavour decays with several invisible particles in the final state. To achieve this, we introduce a self-supervised transformer architecture that learns the decay maps without flavour or exclusive-decay labels by inferring masked particle identification information and completing jets from which constituents have been removed. Across five classification tasks in simulated LHCb Open Data, the self-supervised model outperforms an otherwise identical transformer with random weights, and performs comparably to a fully supervised transformer. We achieve a tagging power of about 10\%. In addition, removing constituents from reconstructed exclusive decays also systematically increases the model anomaly score relative to random removals from the same heavy hadrons. We confirm this behaviour directly in 2017 LHCb proton-proton collision Open Data: the score increases for all eight studied heavy-flavour channels, and the signal region response exceeds that in the adjacent sidebands. These studies provide a proof of principle that mapping heavy-flavour decay environments through jets can transform flavour tagging in LHCb and extend the discovery reach for incomplete or otherwise unusual decays.

Tue 8 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Identifying particles from certain particle decays is hard when some decay products are invisible to detectors. The authors introduce a new machine learning method that learns from existing data without needing labeled examples, helping to map these particle decays more accurately. Their model performs as well as traditional methods that require labeled data and can detect unusual decays better. This approach could help physicists find new phenomena beyond current theories by analyzing complicated particle decay patterns.
Open → 2609.09275v1