Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Codebase release 0.4 for pyBumpHunter

  Louis Vaslin, Samuel Calvet, Vincent Barra, Julien Donini

  SciPost Phys. Codebases 15-r0.4 (2023) · published 14 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · src

  The BumpHunter algorithm is widely used in the search for new particles in High Energy Physics analysis. This algorithm offers the advantage of evaluating the local and global p-values of a localized deviation in the observed data without making any hypothesis on the supposed signal. The increasing popularity of the Python programming language motivated the development of a new public implementation of this algorithm in Python, called pyBumpHunter, together with several improvements and additional features. It is the first public implementation of the BumpHunter algorithm to be added to Scikit-HEP. This paper presents in detail the BumpHunter algorithm as well as all the features proposed in this implementation. All these features have been tested in order to demonstrate their behaviour and performance.

  1 citation

• A brief introduction to extended gravity and connections to dark energy: Illustrated with scalar field examples

  Clare Burrage

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 41 (2022) · published 15 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  These lecture notes provide a brief introduction to extensions of gravity and their connections to dark energy. Due to time and space limitations this is not a comprehensive review of the field. Instead, I aim to introduce key concepts and ideas in this area through a series of examples based on scalar field extensions of gravity and models of dark energy.

  1 citation

• Topological photonic band gaps in honeycomb atomic arrays

  Pierre Wulles, Sergey E. Skipetrov

  SciPost Phys. Core 7, 051 (2024) · published 7 August 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  lattice of two-level atoms coupled by the in-plane electromagnetic field may exhibit band gaps that can be opened either by applying an external magnetic field or by breaking the symmetry between the two triangular sublattices of which the honeycomb one is a superposition. We establish the conditions of band gap opening, compute the width of the gap, and characterize its topological property by a topological index (Chern number). The topological nature of the band gap leads to inversion of the population imbalance between the two triangular sublattices for modes with frequencies near band edges. It also prohibits a transition to the trivial limit of infinitely spaced, noninteracting atoms without closing the spectral gap. Surrounding the lattice by a Fabry-Pérot cavity with small intermirror spacing $d < \pi/k_0$, where $k_0$ is the free-space wave number at the atomic resonance frequency, renders the system Hermitian by suppressing the leakage of energy out of the atomic plane without modifying its topological properties. In contrast, a larger $d$ allows for propagating optical modes that are built up due to reflections at the cavity mirrors and have frequencies inside the band gap of the free-standing lattice, thus closing the latter.

  1 citation

• Muon measurements at the Pierre Auger Observatory

  Dariusz Góra

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 15, 020 (2024) · published 3 April 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world's largest detector for observation of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) (above the energy of $10^{17}$ eV). It consists of a Fluorescence Detector (FD) and an array of particle detectors known as the Surface Detector (SD). Observations of extensive air showers by the Observatory can be used to probe hadronic interactions at high energy, in a kinematic and energy region inaccessible to experiments at man-made accelerators and to measure the muon component of the shower. Air showers induced by different primaries have different muon contents. With increasing mass of the primary cosmic ray particle, it is expected that the muon content in the corresponding air showers should also increase. Therefore, the determination of the muon component in the air shower is crucial to infer the mass of the primary particle. This is a key ingredient in the searches conducted to pinpoint the sources of UHECRs. Recent results obtained from the Pierre Auger Observatory and other experiments indicate that all the shower simulations underestimate the number of muons in the showers compared to the data. This is the so-called muon deficit. In this paper we briefly review the muon measurements, and present in more detail recent results on fluctuations in the muon number. These results provide new insights into the origin of the muon deficit in air shower simulations and constrain the models of hadronic interactions at ultrahigh energies. With the current design of the surface detectors it is also difficult to reliably separate the contributions of muons to the SD signal from the contributions of photons, electrons, and positrons. Therefore, we also present a new method to extract the muon component of the signal time traces recorded by each SD station using recurrent neural networks. The combination of such algorithms, with the future data collected by the upgraded Pierre Auger Observatory, will be a major step forward, as we are likely to achieve an unprecedented resolution in mass estimation on an event-by-event basis.

  1 citation

• A new Wilson line-based classical action for gluodynamics

  Hiren Kakkad, Piotr Kotko, Anna Stasto

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 7, 011 (2022) · published 20 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We develop a new classical action that in addition to $\mathrm{MHV}$ vertices contains also $\mathrm{N^kMHV}$ vertices, where $1\leq k \leq n-4$ with $n$ the number of external legs. The lowest order vertex is the four-point MHV vertex -- there is no three point vertex and thus the amplitude calculation involves fewer vertices than in the CSW method. The action is obtained by a canonical transformation of the Yang-Mills action in the light-cone gauge, where the field transformations are based on Wilson line functionals.

  1 citation

• Reduction in radioactivity-induced backgrounds using a novel active veto detector for rare event search experiments

  Mouli Chaudhuri, Andrew Jastram, Glenn Agnolet, Samir Banik, Hao Chen, Vijay Iyer, Varchaswi K. S. Kashyap, Andrew Kubik, Matthew Lee, Rupak Mahapatra, Sandro Maludze, Nader Mirabolfathi, Nityasa Mishra, Bedangadas Mohanty, Himangshu Neog, Mark Platt

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 017 (2023) · published 3 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The results of a newly developed annular cryogenic phonon-mediated active veto detector are discussed which shows a significant reduction of radioactivity-induced backgrounds in rare event search experiments. The veto detector is made up of germanium weighing $\sim$500 g with an outer diameter of 76 mm and an inner diameter of 28 mm. The detector can host a 25 mm diameter germanium inner target detector of mass $\sim$10 g. A GEANT4 simulation with the active veto and inner target detector shows a gamma background reduction of 50 - 80% which is further improved (> 90%) with 4$\pi$ veto coverage. Experimental measurements with the detector assembly agree well with the simulation.

  1 citation

• Applying machine learning methods to prediction problems of lattice observables

  N. V. Gerasimeniuk, M. N. Chernodub, V. A. Goy, D. L. Boyda, S. D. Liubimov, A. V. Molochkov

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 6, 020 (2022) · published 31 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We discuss the prediction of critical behavior of lattice observables in SU(2) and SU(3) gauge theories. We show that feed-forward neural network, trained on the lattice configurations of gauge fields as input data, finds correlations with the target observable, which is also true in the critical region where the neural network has not been trained. We have verified that the neural network constructs a gauge-invariant function and this property does not change over the entire range of the parameter space.

  1 citation

• Search for light WIMP recoils on methane with NEWS-G

  Francisco A. Vazquez de Sola Fernandez on behalf of the NEWS-G collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 073 (2024) · published 4 June 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The NEWS-G collaboration is searching for light dark matter using single-electron-threshold Spherical Proportional Counters (SPCs) filled with light gaseous targets (H, He, Ne). NEWS-G has built a new 140 cm diameter SPC equipped with a multi-anode ACHINOS sensor. Robust calibrations with a UV laser and an $\mathrm{^{37}}$Ar source were performed to characterize the detector response to low energy events and achieve statistical background rejection. This work presents preliminary results from physics data taken with methane, leading to world-leading spin-dependent sensitivity under 2 $\mathrm{GeV/c^{2}}$ WIMP masses.

  1 citation

• Jordan meets Freudenthal. A black hole exceptional story

  Alessio Marrani

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 14, 009 (2023) · published 23 November 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Within the extremal black hole attractors arising in ungauged $\mathcal{N}≥ 2$-extended Maxwell Einstein supergravity theories in $3+1$ space-time dimensions, we provide an overview of the stratification of the electric-magnetic charge representation space into "large" orbits and related "moduli spaces", under the action of the (continuous limit of the) non-compact $U$-duality Lie group. While each "large" orbit of the $U$-duality supports a class of attractors, the corresponding " moduli space" is the proper subspace of the scalar manifold spanned by those scalar fields on which the Attractor Mechanism is inactive. We present the case study concerning $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity theories with symmetric vector multiplets' scalar manifold, which in all cases (with the exception of the minimally coupled models) have the electric-magnetic charge representation of $U$-duality fitting into a reduced Freudenthal triple system over a cubic (simple or semi-simple) Jordan algebra.

  1 citation

• Exact first-order effect of interactions on the ground-state energy of harmonically-confined fermions

  Pierre Le Doussal, Naftali R. Smith, Nathan Argaman

  SciPost Phys. 17, 038 (2024) · published 7 August 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider a system of $N$ spinless fermions, interacting with each other via a power-law interaction $\epsilon/r^n$, and trapped in an external harmonic potential $V(r) = r^2/2$, in $d=1,2,3$ dimensions. For any $0 < n < d+2$, we obtain the ground-state energy $E_N$ of the system perturbatively in $\epsilon$, $E_{N}=E_{N}^{(0)}+\epsilon E_{N}^{(1)}+O(\epsilon^{2})$. We calculate $E_{N}^{(1)}$ exactly, assuming that $N$ is such that the "outer shell" is filled. For the case of $n=1$ (corresponding to a Coulomb interaction for $d=3$), we extract the $N \gg 1$ behavior of $E_{N}^{(1)}$, focusing on the corrections to the exchange term with respect to the leading-order term that is predicted from the local density approximation applied to the Thomas-Fermi approximate density distribution. The leading correction contains a logarithmic divergence, and is of particular importance in the context of density functional theory. We also study the effect of the interactions on the fermions' spatial density. Finally, we find that our result for $E_{N}^{(1)}$ significantly simplifies in the case where $n$ is even.

  1 citation