Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• The Scintillating Bubble Chamber Experiment

  Ben Broerman

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 023 (2023) · published 3 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is combining the well-established liquid argon and bubble chamber technologies to search for low-mass, GeV-scale dark matter. Liquid-noble bubble chambers benefit from the excellent electron-recoil insensitivity inherent in bubble chambers with the addition of energy reconstruction provided from the scintillation signal for background rejection. The projected sensitivity with a quasi-background-free 10-kg-year exposure at a 100 eV nuclear recoil threshold is approximately 10$^{-43}$ cm$^2$ for a 1 GeV/c$^2$ dark matter mass.

• A data-driven method to estimate the antiproton background in Mu2e

  Namitha Chithirasreemadam, Simone Donati, Pavel Murat, on behalf of the Mu2e collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 17, 025 (2025) · published 23 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The Mu2e experiment will search for the CLFV process of neutrinoless, coherent conversion of muon to electron in the field of an Al nucleus. One of the expected backgrounds is antiprotons produced by the proton beam at the Production Target and annihilating in the Stopping Target to produce signal-like electrons. Although not a dominant background, it has a large uncertainty and cannot be suppressed by the timing cuts used to reduce the prompt background. However, at Mu2e energies, $p\bar{p}$ annihilation is the only source of events with multiple, simultaneous particles coming from the Stopping Target. We utilized this unique feature and developed a novel approach to reconstruct multi-track events and estimate the antiproton background.

• Trials factor for semi-supervised NN classifiers in searches for narrow resonances at the LHC

  Benjamin Lieberman, Salah-Eddine Dahbi, Andreas Crivellin, Finn Stevenson, Nidhi Tripathi, Mukesh Kumar, Bruce Mellado

  SciPost Phys. Core 7, 073 (2024) · published 13 November 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  To mitigate the model dependencies of searches for new narrow resonances at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), semi-supervised Neural Networks (NNs) can be used. Unlike fully supervised classifiers these models introduce an additional look-elsewhere effect in the process of optimising thresholds on the response distribution. We perform a frequentist study to quantify this effect, in the form of a trials factor. As an example, we consider simulated $Z\gamma$ data to perform narrow resonance searches using semi-supervised NN classifiers. The results from this analysis provide substantiation that the look-elsewhere effect induced by the semi-supervised NN is under control.

• Anisotropic ionization threshold and directional sensitivity in solid state DM detectors

  Matti Heikinheimo, Sebastian Sassi, Kimmo Tuominen, Kai Nordlund, Nader Mirabolfathi

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 020 (2023) · published 3 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The threshold displacement energy for nuclear recoils depends strongly on the direction of the recoiling nucleus with respect to the crystal lattice. Assuming that similar dependence holds for the ionization threshold for low energy nuclear recoils, we explore the consequences of the resulting directional dependence of the observable event rate in ionization detectors. For low mass dark matter, this effect leads to a daily modulation in the event rate. We discuss how this effect can be utilized to separate the DM signal from the solar neutrino background and how the structure of the modulation signal can be used to identify the type of the DM-nucleon coupling.

• The CYGNO/INITIUM experiment

  F. D. Amaro, E. Baracchini, L. Benussi , S. Bianco, C. Capoccia, M. Caponero, D. Santos Cardoso, G. Cavoto, A. Cortez, I. A. Costa, E. Dané, G. Dho, F. Di Giambattista, E. Di Marco, G. D’Imperio, F. Iacoangeli, H. P. L. Jùnior, G. S. P. Lopes, G. Maccarrone, R. D. P. Mano, R. R. M. Gregorio, D. J. G. Marques, G. Mazzitelli, A. G. McLean, A. Messina, C. M. B. Monteiro, R. A. Nobrega, I. Fonseca Pains, E. Paoletti, L. Passamonti, S. Pelosi, F. Petrucci, S. Piacentini, D. Piccolo, D. Pierluigi, D. Pinci, A. Prajapati, F. Renga, R. J. C. Roque, F. Rosatelli, A. Russo, J. M. F. dos Santos, G. Saviano, N. J. C. Spooner, R. Tesauro, S. Tommasini, S. Torelli

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 019 (2023) · published 3 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The CYGNO project for the development of a high precision optical readout gaseous TPC for directional Dark Matter search and solar neutrino spectroscopy will be presented. It is to be hosted at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. CYGNO peculiar features are the use of sCMOS cameras and PMTs coupled to GEMs amplification of a helium-based gas mixture at atmospheric pressure, in order to achieve 3D tracking with head tail capability and background rejection down to O(keV) energy, to boost sensitivity to low WIMP masses. The latest R&D results within the CYGNO project will be discussed along with the underground installation and operation of a 50 l prototype, soon to be followed by a O(1) m3 experiment demonstrator in 2024-2026. The latest results on the negative ion drift operation at atmospheric pressure within CYGNO optical readout approach will be illustrated, which is the aim of the ERC Consolidator Grant project INITIUM.

• An alternative evaluation of the leading-order hadronic contribution to the muon $g-2$ with MUonE

  Riccardo N. Pilato

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 17, 024 (2025) · published 23 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The MUonE experiment proposes a novel approach to determine the hadronic contribution to the muon $g-2$, $a_\mu^\text{HLO}$, based on the measurement of the hadronic running of the QED coupling through the analysis of $\mu-e$ elastic scattering events. This could clarify the tensions in the current evaluations of $a_\mu^\text{HLO}$, which are limiting the comparison between theory and experiment for the muon $g-2$. The measurement will be performed at CERN’s North Area by scattering a 160 GeV muon beam on the atomic electrons of a low-Z target. The status and future plans of the experiment will be presented. Furthermore, an alternative method to extract $a_\mu^\text{HLO}$ from MUonE data will be discussed.

• Few-nucleon system dynamics studied via deuteron-deuteron collisions at 160 MeV

  I. Ciepał , K. Bodek, N. Kalantar-Nayestanaki , G. Khatri , St. Kistryn , B. Kłos, A. Kozela , J. Kuboś, P. Kulessa , A. Łobejko, A. Magiera , J. Messchendorp , I. Mazumdar, W. Parol , R. Ramazani-Sharifabadi, D. Rozpędzik , I. Skwira-Chalot , E. Stephan, A. Wilczek , B. Włoch, A. Wrońska , J. Zejma

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 3, 018 (2020) · published 25 February 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Four nucleon scattering at intermediate energies provides unique opportunities to study effects of the two key ingredients of the nuclear dynamics, the nucleon-nucleon P-wave (NNP-wave) and the three-nucleon force (3NF). This is possible only with systematic and precise data, in conjunction with exact theoretical calculations. Using the BINA detector at KVI Groningen, the Netherlands, a rich set of differential cross section of the 2H(d, dp)n breakup reaction at 160 MeV deuteron beam energy has been measured. Besides the three-body breakup, also cross sections of the 2H(d, 3He)n proton transfer reaction have been obtained. The data are compared to the recent calculations for the three-cluster breakup.

• The low-energy spectrum in DAMIC at SNOLAB

  Alvaro E. Chavarria

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 011 (2023) · published 3 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The DAMIC experiment employs large-area, thick charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to search for the interactions of low-mass dark matter particles in the galactic halo with silicon atoms in the CCD target. From 2017 to 2019, DAMIC collected data with a seven-CCD array (40-gram target) installed in the SNOLAB underground laboratory. We report dark-matter search results, including a conspicuous excess of events above the background model below 200$V_{ee}$, whose origin remains unknown. We present details of the published spectral analysis, and update on the deployment of skipper CCDs to perform a more precise measurement by early 2023.

• On the role of non-linear latent features in bipartite generative neural networks

  Tony Bonnaire, Giovanni Catania, Aurélien Decelle, Beatriz Seoane

  SciPost Phys. 19, 141 (2025) · published 1 December 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the phase diagram and memory retrieval capabilities of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), an archetypal model of bipartite energy-based neural networks, as a function of the prior distribution imposed on their hidden units—including binary, multi-state, and ReLU-like activations. Drawing connections to the Hopfield model and employing analytical tools from statistical physics of disordered systems, we explore how the architectural choices and activation functions shape the thermodynamic properties of these models. Our analysis reveals that standard RBMs with binary hidden nodes and extensive connectivity suffer from reduced critical capacity, limiting their effectiveness as associative memories. To address this, we examine several modifications, such as introducing local biases and adopting richer hidden unit priors. These adjustments restore ordered retrieval phases and markedly improve recall performance, even at finite temperatures. Our theoretical findings, supported by finite-size Monte Carlo simulations, highlight the importance of hidden unit design in enhancing the expressive power of RBMs.

• Properties of heavy mesons at finite temperature

  Gloria Montaña, Angels Ramos, Laura Tolós

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 3, 038 (2020) · published 26 February 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the properties of heavy mesons using a unitarized approach in a hot pionic medium, based on an effective hadronic theory. The interaction between the heavy mesons and pseudoscalar Goldstone bosons is described by a chiral Lagrangian at next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion and leading order in the heavy-quark mass expansion so as to satisfy heavy-quark spin symmetry. The meson-meson scattering problem in coupled channels with finite-temperature corrections is solved in a self-consistent manner. Our results show that the masses of the ground-state charmed mesons $D(0^-)$ and $D_s(1^-)$ decrease in a pionic environment at $T\neq 0$ and they acquire a substantial width. As a consequence, the behaviour of excited mesonic states (i.e. $D_{s0}^*(2317)^\pm$ and $D_0^*(2300)^{0,\pm}$), generated dynamically in our heavy-light molecular model, is also modified at $T\neq 0$. The aim is to test our results against Lattice QCD calculations in the future.