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Mackey, Lester

Publications and source records attributed to Mackey, Lester.

Jet-images — deep learning edition

Building on the notion of a particle physics detector as a camera and the collimated streams of high energy particles, or jets, it measures as an image, we investigate the potential of machine learning techniques based on deep learning architectures to identify highly boosted W bosons. Modern deep learning algorithms trained on jet images can out-perform standard physically-motivated feature driven approaches to jet tagging. We develop techniques for visualizing how these features are learned by the network and what additional information is used to improve performance. Finally, this interplay between physically-motivated feature driven tools and supervised learning algorithms is general and can be used to significantly increase the sensitivity to discover new particles and new forces, and gain a deeper understanding of the physics within jets.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Fuzzy jets

Collimated streams of particles produced in high energy physics experiments are organized using clustering algorithms to form jets . To construct jets, the experimental collaborations based at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) primarily use agglomerative hierarchical clustering schemes known as sequential recombination. We propose a new class of algorithms for clustering jets that use infrared and collinear safe mixture models. These new algorithms, known as fuzzy jets , are clustered using maximum likelihood techniques and can dynamically determine various properties of jets like their size. We show that the fuzzy jet size adds additional information to conventional jet tagging variables in boosted topologies. Furthermore, we study the impact of pileup and show that with some slight modifications to the algorithm, fuzzy jets can be stable up to high pileup interaction multiplicities.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗