10348258
Studies of boosted decision trees for MiniBooNE particle identification
Boosted decision trees are applied to particle identification in the MiniBooNE experiment operated at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) for neutrino oscillations. Numerous attempts are made to tune the boosted decision trees, to compare performance of various boosting algorithms, and to select input variables for optimal performance.
6347081
Calibration of the ATLAS muon spectrometer precision chambers for initial LHC beam collisions
ATLAS is a general purpose experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN which began operation in September, 2009. ATLAS has a large muon spectrometer which is designed to measure muon momentum with a resolution ranging from 3% at 100 GeV/c to 10% at 1 TeV for a pseudorapidity range of 0-2.7. In this paper, we describe the derivation and validation of calibration constants for the Monitored Drift Tubes (MDTs) in the ATLAS muon spectrometer for use with initial LHC collisions. At LHC start-up, the luminosity was not sufficient for ordinary calibrations with collision muons, and so alternative methods were developed. The time-to-space (RT) functions were obtained from the University of Michigan gas monitor chamber and the ( t 0 s) were derived from LHC beamsplash events from 2009 and 2010. We have validated these calibration constants by performing muon track reconstruction using 900 GeV collision data from December, 2009 and 7 TeV data from 2010. We find that these calibration constants yield an MDT chamber hit resolution of 142 μ m and a residual width of 91 μ m.
8948467
High-precision absolute distance and vibration measurement with frequency scanned interferometry.
We report high-precision absolute distance and vibration measurements performed with frequency scanned interferometry using a pair of single-mode optical fibers. Absolute distance was determined by counting the interference fringes produced while scanning the laser frequency. A high-finesse Fabry-Perot interferometer was used to determine frequency changes during scanning. Two multiple-distance-measurement analysis techniques were developed to improve distance precision and to extract the amplitude and frequency of vibrations. Under laboratory conditions, measurement precision of approximately 50 nm was achieved for absolute distances ranging from 0.1 to 0.7 m by use of the first multiple-distance-measurement technique. The second analysis technique has the capability to measure vibration frequencies ranging from 0.1 to 100 Hz with an amplitude as small as a few nanometers without a priori knowledge.
17682877
Impact of Tracker Design on Higgs and Slepton Measurements
We have studied the impact of charged track resolution on Higgs mass and production cross section measurement in the process e+e− → Z0H,Z0 → + −,H → X for Higgs masses between 120 and 160 GeV, and on smuon mass measurement using smuon pair production for three different mass pairs, assuming the International Linear Collider(ILC) is operated at 500 GeV center of mass energies (CME) with integrated luminosities of 500 fb−1. The effect of initial state radiation (ISR), beamstrahlung and beam energy spread on Higgs and smuon mass measurement are also estimated. Using fast Monte Carlo simulations of the 2001 North American baseline detector designs (LD and SD), we find that the ISR and beamstrahlung have significant impact on Higgs and smuon mass measurement; Charged track momentum resolution affect Higgs mass significantly with better track performance yielding better Higgs mass resolution and precision for the track momentum resolution improvement up to a factor of about 5; Track momentum resolution has little effect on the measurement precision of the Higgsstrahlung cross section, the branching ratio of H → CC, the smuon and neutralino masses; Beam energy spread better than about 0.2% has little effect on Higgs, smuon and neutralino masses; The SD detector provides a more accurate measurement than the LD of the Higgs mass.
17983245
Boosted decision trees, a powerful event classifier
Consider the problem of classification of events between signal and background, given a number of particle identification (PID) variables. A decision tree is a sequence of binary splits of the data. To train the tree a set of known training events are used. The results are measured using a separate set of known testing events. Consider all of the data to be on one node. The best PID variable and best place on that variable to split the data into separate signal and background is found. There are then two nodes. The process is repeated on these new nodes and is continued until a given number of final nodes (called “leaves”) are obtained, or until all leaves are pure or until a node has too few events. There are several popular criteria to determine the best PID variable and best place on which to split a node. The gini criterion is used here. Suppose that event i has weight Wi. The purity P of a node is defined as the weight of signal events on the node divided by the total weight of events on that node. For a given node: gini = P (1 − P ) ∑ i Wi. gini is zero for P = 1 or P = 0. The best split is chosen as the one which minimizes gini. The next node to split is chosen by finding that node whose splitting maximizes the change in gini. In this way a decision tree is built. Leaves with P ≥ 0.5 are signal leaves and the rest are background leaves. Decision trees are powerful, but unstable. A small change in the training data can produce a large change in the tree. This is remedied by the use of boosting. For boosting, the training events which were misclassified (a signal event fell on a background leaf or vice versa) have their weights increased (boosted), and a new tree is formed. This procedure is then repeated for the new tree. In this way many trees are built up. The score from the mth individual tree Tm is taken as +1 if the event falls on a signal leaf and −1 if the event falls on a background leaf. The final score is taken as a weighted sum of the scores of the individual leaves. Two methods for boosting are considered here. The first is called AdaBoost. Define errm = weight misclassified/total weight for tree m. Let αm = β log [(1 − errm)/errm], where β is a constant. In the statistical literature β has been taken as one, but for the MiniBooNE experiment, β = 0.5 has been found to be the optimum value. The misclassified events have their weight multiplied by em . The weights are then renormalized so the sum of all of the training event weights is one. The final score is T = ∑Ntree m=1 αmTm. The second method of boosting considered here is called -boost or, sometimes, shrinkage. Misclassified events have their weight multiplied by e , where is a constant. For the MiniBooNE experiment, = 0.03 has been optimum. (The results vary only mildly as β or are changed a bit.) The final score is T = ∑Ntree m=1 Tm. -boost changes weights a little at a time, while AdaBoost can be shown to try to optimize each change in weights to minimize e where T is the score and y is +1 for a signal event and −1 for a background event. The optimum value is F = log prob/(1 − prob), where prob is the probability that y = 1, given the observed PID variables. In practice, for MiniBooNE, the two boosting methods have performed almost equally well. Boosting is described as using many weak classifiers to build a strong classifier. This is seen in Figure 1. After the first few trees, the misclassification fraction for an individual tree is above 40%. In the MiniBooNE experiment some hundreds of possible PID variables have been suggested. The most powerful of these have been selected by accepting those which are used most often as the splitting variable. Some care needs to be taken as some-
55601550
Fermion's Tunnelling with Effects of Quantum Gravity
In this paper, using Hamilton-Jacobi method, we address the tunnelling of fermions in a 4-dimensional Schwarzschild spacetime. Based on the generalized uncertainty principle, we introduce 
the influence of quantum gravity. After solving the equation of motion of the spin-1/2 field, we 
derive the corrected Hawking temperature. It turns out that the correction depends not only on 
the black hole’s mass but also on the mass (energy) of emitted fermions. It is of interest that, in 
our calculation, the quantum gravity correction decelerates the temperature increase during the radiation 
explicitly. This observation then naturally leads to the remnants in black hole evaporation. 
Our calculation shows that the residue mass is , where is the Planck mass and is a dimensionless parameter accounting for quantum gravity effects. The evaporation singularity is 
then avoided.
119289762
Quantum gravity effects on compact star cores
Abstract Using the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff equation and the equation of state of zero temperature ultra-relativistic Fermi gas based on generalized uncertainty principle (GUP), the quantum gravitational effects on the cores of compact stars are discussed. Our results show that 2 m ( r ) / r varies with r. Quantum gravity plays an important role in the region r ∼ 10 3 r 0 , where r 0 ∼ β 0 l p , l p is the Planck length and β 0 is a dimensionless parameter accounting for quantum gravity effects. Furthermore, near the center of compact stars, we find that the metric components are g t t ∼ r 4 and g r r = [ 1 − r 2 / ( 6 r 0 2 ) ] − 1 . All these effects are different from those obtained from classical gravity. These results can be applied to neutron stars or denser ones like quark stars. The observed masses of neutron stars ( ⩽ 2 M ⊙ ) indicate that β 0 can not exceed 1037, not as good as the upper bound β 0 10 34 from simple electroweak consideration. This means that incorporating either quantum gravity effects or nuclear interactions, one obtains almost the same mass limits of neutron stars.
55495910
Homogeneous Field and WKB Approximation in Deformed Quantum Mechanics with Minimal Length
In the framework of the deformed quantum mechanics with a minimal length, we consider the motion of a nonrelativistic particle in a homogeneous external field. We find the integral representation for the physically acceptable wave function in the position representation. Using the method of steepest descent, we obtain the asymptotic expansions of the wave function at large positive and negative arguments. We then employ the leading asymptotic expressions to derive the WKB connection formula, which proceeds from classically forbidden region to classically allowed one through a turning point. By the WKB connection formula, we prove the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization rule up to . We also show that if the slope of the potential at a turning point is too steep, the WKB connection formula is no longer valid around the turning point. The effects of the minimal length on the classical motions are investigated using the Hamilton-Jacobi method. We also use the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization to study statistical physics in deformed spaces with the minimal length.
119631824
EINSTEIN MANIFOLDS AS YANG–MILLS INSTANTONS
It is well known that Einstein gravity can be formulated as a gauge theory of Lorentz group where spin connections play a role of gauge fields and Riemann curvature tensors correspond to their field strengths. One can then pose an interesting question: What is the Einstein equation from the gauge theory point of view? Or equivalently, what is the gauge theory object corresponding to Einstein manifolds? We show that the Einstein equations in four dimensions are precisely self-duality equations in Yang–Mills gauge theory and so Einstein manifolds correspond to Yang–Mills instantons in SO(4) = SU(2)L × SU(2)R gauge theory. Specifically, we prove that any Einstein manifold with or without a cosmological constant always arises as the sum of SU(2)L instantons and SU(2)R anti-instantons. This result explains why an Einstein manifold must be stable because two kinds of instantons belong to different gauge groups, instantons in SU(2)L and anti-instantons in SU(2)R, and so they cannot decay into a vacuum. We furthe...
18270173
Identified particle production in p + p and d +Au collisions at RHIC
The BRAHMS experiment at RHIC has measured the transverse momentum spectra of charged pions, kaons and (anti-)protons over a wide range of rapidity in d+Au and p+p collisions at √SNN = 200 GeV. The nuclear modification factor R dAu at forward rapidity shows a clear suppression for π + . The measured net-proton yields in p+p collisions are compared to PYTHIA and HIJING/B and seem to be better described by the latter.