## Catching The Higgs Speeding

Article Title: Inclusive search for highly boosted Higgs bosons decaying to bottom quark-antiquark pairs in proton-proton collisions at √s= 13 TeV

Authors: The CMS Collaboration

Reference arxiv:2006.13251

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson one of the main tasks of the LHC experiments has been to study all of its properties and see if they match the Standard Model predictions. Most of this effort has gone into characterizing the different ways the Higgs can be produced (‘production modes’) and how often it decays into its different channels (‘branching ratios’). However if you are a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog, you might have also wondered ‘How often does the Higgs go really fast?’. While that might sound like a very silly question, it is actually a very interesting one to study, and what has been done in this recent CMS analysis.

But what does it mean for the Higgs to ‘go fast’? You might have thought that the Higgs moves quite slowly because it is the 2nd heaviest fundamental particle we know of, with a mass around 125 times that of a proton. But sometimes very energetic LHC collisions can have enough energy to not only to make a Higgs boson but give it a ‘kick’ as well. If the Higgs is produced with enough momentum that it moves away from the beamline at a speed relatively close to the speed of light we call it ‘boosted’.

Not only are these boosted Higgs just a very cool thing to study, they can also be crucial to seeing the effects of new particles interacting with the Higgs. If there was a new heavy particle interacting with the Higgs during its production you would expect to see the largest effect on the rates of Higgs production at high momentum. So if you don’t look specifically at the rates of these boosted Higgs production you might miss this clue of new physics.

Another benefit is that when the Higgs is produced with a boost it significantly changes its experimental signature, often making it easier to spot. The Higgs’s favorite decay channel, its decay into a pair of bottom quarks, is notoriously difficult to study. A bottom quark, like any quark produced in an LHC collision, does not reach the detector directly, but creates a huge shower of particles known as a jet. Because bottom quarks live long enough to travel a little bit away from the beam interaction point before decaying, their jets start a little bit displaced compared to other jets. This allows experimenters to ‘tag’ jets likely to have come from bottom quarks. In short, the experimental signature of this Higgs decay is two jets that look bottom-like. This signal is very hard to find amidst a background of jets produced via the strong force which occur at rates orders of magnitude more often than Higgs production.

But when a particle with high momentum decays, its decay products will be closer together in the reference frame of the detector. When the Higgs is produced with a boost, the two bottom quarks form a single large jet rather than two separated jets. This single jet should have the signature of two b quarks inside of it rather than just one. What’s more, the distribution of particles within the jet should form 2 distinct ‘prongs’, one coming from each of the bottom quarks, rather than a single core that would be characteristic of a jet produced by a single quark or gluon. These distinct characteristics help analyzers pick out events more likely to be boosted Higgs from regular QCD events.

The end goal is to select events with these characteristics and then look for a excess of events that have an invariant mass of 125 GeV, which would be the tell-tale sign of the Higgs. When this search was performed they did see such a bump, an excess over the estimated background with a significance of 2.5 standard deviations. This is actually a stronger signal than they were expecting to see in the Standard Model. They measure the strength of the signal they see to be 3.7 ± 1.6 times the strength predicted by the Standard Model.

The analyzers then study this excess more closely by checking the signal strength in different regions of Higgs momentum. What they see is that the excess is coming from the events with the highest momentum Higgs’s.  The significance of the excess of high momentum Higgs’s above the Standard Model prediction is about 2 standard deviations.

So what we should we make of these extra speedy Higgs’s? Well first of all, the deviation from the Standard Model it is not very statistically significant yet, so it may disappear with further study. ATLAS is likely working on a similar measurement with their current dataset so we will wait to see if they confirm this excess. Another possibility is that the current predictions for the Standard Model, which are based on difficult perturbative QCD calculations, may be slightly off. Theorists will probably continue make improvements to these predictions in the coming years. But if we continue to see the same effect in future measurements, and the Standard Model prediction doesn’t budge, these speedy Higgs’s may turn out to be our first hint of the physics beyond the Standard Model!

First Evidence the Higgs Talks to Other Generations“: previous ParticleBites post on recent Higgs boson news

A decade of advances in jet substructure“: Cern Courier article on techniques to identify boosted particles (like the Higgs) decaying into jets

Jets: From Energy Deposits to Physics Objects“: previous ParticleBites post on how jets are measured

## SUSY vs. The Machines

Article title: Bayesian Neural Networks for Fast SUSY Predictions

Authors: B. S. Kronheim, M. P. Kuchera, H. B. Prosper, A. Karbo

Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.04506

It has been a while since we have graced these parts with the sounds of the attractive yet elusive superhero named SUSY. With such an arduous history of experimental effort, supersymmetry still remains unseen by the eyes of even the most powerful colliders. Though in the meantime, phenomenologists and theorists continue to navigate the vast landscape of model parameters with hopes of narrowing in on the most intriguing predictions – even connecting dark matter into the whole mess.

How vast you may ask? Well the ‘vanilla’ scenario, known as the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) – containing partner particles for each of those of the Standard Model – is chock-full of over 100 free parameters. This makes rigorous explorations of the parameter space not only challenging to interpret, but also computationally expensive. In fact, the standard practice is to confine oneself to a subset of the parameter space, using suitable justifications, and go ahead to predict useful experimental observables like collider production rates or particle masses. One of these popular motivations is known as the phenoneological MSSM (pMSSM), which reduces the huge parameter area to just less than 20 by assuming the absence of things like SUSY-driven CP-violation, flavour changing neutral currents (FCNCs) and differences between first and second generation SUSY particles. With this in the toolbox, computations become comparatively more feasible, with just enough complexity to make solid but interesting predictions.

But even coming from personal experience, these spaces can still be typically be rather tedious to work through – especially since many parameter selections are theoretically nonviable and/or in disagreement with previously well-established experimental observables, like the mass of the Higgs Boson. Maybe there is a faster way?

Machine learning has shared a successful history with a lot of high-energy physics applications, particularly those with complex dynamics like SUSY. One particularly useful application, at which machine learning is very accomplished at, is classification of points as excluded or not excluded based on searches at the LHC by ATLAS and CMS.

In the considered paper, a special type of Neural Network (NN) known as a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) is used, which notably rely on probablistic certainty of classification rather than simply classifying a result as one thing or the other.

In a typical NN there is a space of adjustable parameters (often called “features”) and a list of “targets” for the model to learn classification from. In this particular case, the model parameters are of course the features to learn from – these mainly include mass parameters for the different superparticles in the spectrum. These are mapped to three different predictions or targets that can be computed from these parameters:

1. The mass of the lightest, neutral Higgs Boson (the 125 GeV one)
2. The cross sections of processes involving the superpartners to the elecroweak guage bosons (typically called the neutralinos and charginos – I will let you figure out which ones are the charged and neutral ones)
3. Whether the point is actually valid or not (or maybe theoretically consistent is a better way to put it).

Of course there is an entire suite of programs designed to carry out these calculations, which are usually done point by point in the parameter space of the pMSSM, and hence these would be used to construct the training data sets for the algorithm to learn from – one data set for each of the predictions listed above.

But how do we know our model is trained properly once we have finished the learning process? There are a number of metrics that are very commonly used to determine whether a machine learning algorithm can correctly classify the results of a set of parameter points. The following table sums up the four different types of classifications that could be made on a set of data.

The typical measures employed using this table are the precision, recall and F1 score which are in practice readily defined as:

$P = \frac{TP}{TP+FP}, \quad R = \frac{TP}{TP+FN}, \quad F_1 = 2\frac{P \cdot R}{P+R}.$

In predicting the validity of points, the recall especially will tell us the fraction of valid points that will be correctly identified by the algorithm. For example, the metrics for this validity data set are shown in Table 2.

With a higher Recall but lower precision for the 3 standard deviation cutoff it is clear that points with a larger uncertainty will be classified as valid in this case. Such a scenario would be useful in calculating further properties like the mass spectrum, but not neccesarily as the best classifier.

Similarly with the data set used to compute cross sections, the standard deviation can be used for points where the predictions are quite uncertain. On average their calculations revealed just over 3% percent error with the actual value of the cross section. Not to be outdone, in calculating the Higgs boson mass, within 2 GeV deviation of 125 GeV, the precision of the BNN was found to be 0.926 with a recall of 0.997, showing that very few parameter points that are actually conistent with the light neutral Higgs will actually be removed.

In the end, our whole purpose was to provide reliable SUSY predictions at a fraction of the time. It is well known that NNs provide relatively fast calculation, especially when utilizing powerful hardware, and in this case could acheive up to over 16 million times faster in computing a single point than standard SUSY software! Finally, it is worth to note that neural networks are highly scalable and so predictions from the 19-dimensional pMSSM are but one of the possibilities for NNs in calculating SUSY observables.

[1] Bayesian Neural Networks and how they differ from traditional NNs: https://towardsdatascience.com/making-your-neural-network-say-i-dont-know-bayesian-nns-using-pyro-and-pytorch-b1c24e6ab8cd

[2] More on machine learning and A.I. and its application to SUSY: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.02797

## Representation and Discrimination in Particle Physics

Particle physics, like its overarching fields of physics and astronomy, has a diversity problem. Black students and researchers are severely underrepresented in our field, and many of them report feeling unsupported, unincluded, and undervalued throughout their careers. Although Black students enter into the field as undergraduates at comparable rates to white students, 8.5 times more white students than Black students enter PhD programs in physics¹. This suggests that the problem lies not in generating interest for the subject, but in the creation of an inclusive space for science.

This isn’t new information, although it has arguably not received the full attention it deserves, perhaps because everybody has not been on the same page. Before we go any further, let’s start with the big question: why is diversity in physics important? In an era where physics research is done increasingly collaboratively, the processes of cultivating talent across the social and racial spectrum is a strength that benefits all physicists. Having team members who can ask new questions or think differently about a problem leads to a wider variety of ideas and creativity in problem-solving approaches. It is advantageous to diversify a team, as the cohesiveness of the team often matters more in collaborative efforts than the talents of the individual members. While bringing on individuals from different backgrounds doesn’t guarantee the success of this endeavor, it does increase the probability of being able to tackle a problem using a variety of approaches. This is critical to doing good physics.

This naturally leads us to an analysis of the current state of diversity in physics. We need to recognize that physics is both subject to the underlying societal current of white supremacy and often perpetuates it through unconscious biases that manifest in bureaucratic structures, admissions and hiring policies, and harmful modes of unchecked communication. This is a roadblock to the accessibility of the field to the detriment of all physicists, as high attrition rates for a specific group suggests a loss of talent. But more than that, we should be striving to create departments and workplaces where all individuals and their ideas are values and welcomed. In order to work toward this, we need to:

1. Gather data: Why are Black students and researchers leaving the field at significantly higher rates? What is it like to be Black in physics?
2. Introspect: What are we doing (or not doing) to support Black students in physics classrooms and departments? How have I contributed to this problem? How has my department contributed to this problem? How can I change these behaviors and advocate for others?
3. Act: Often, well-meaning discussions remain just that — discussions. How can we create accountability to ensure that any agreed-upon action items are carried out? How can we track this progress over time?

Luckily, on the first point, there has been plenty of data that has already been gathered, although further studies are necessary to widen the scope of our understanding. Let’s look at the numbers.

Black representation at the undergraduate level is the lowest in physics out of all the STEM fields, at roughly 3%. This number has decreased from 5% in 1999, despite the total number of bachelor’s degrees earned in physics more than doubling during that time² (note: 13% of the United States population is Black). While the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students increased by 36% across the physical sciences from 1995 to 2015, the corresponding percentage solely for physics degrees increased by only 4%². This suggests that, while access has theoretically increased, retention has not. This tells a story of extra barriers for Black physics students that push them away from the field.

This is corroborated as we move up the academic ladder. At the graduate level, the total number of physics PhDs awarded to Black students has fluctuated between 10 and 20 from 1997 to 2012⁴. From 2010 to 2012, only 2% of physics doctoral students in the United States were Black out of a total of 843 total physics PhDs⁴. For Black women, the numbers are the most dire, having received only 22 PhDs in astronomy and 144 PhDs in physics or closely-related fields in the entire history of United States physics graduate programs. Meanwhile, the percentage of Black faculty members from 2004 to 2012 has stayed relatively consistent, hovering around 2%⁵. Black students and faculty alike often report being the sole Black person in their department.

Where do these discrepancies come from? In January, the American Institute for Physics (AIP) released its TEAM-UP report summarizing what it found to be the main causes for Black underrepresentation in physics. According to the report, a main contribution to these numbers is whether students are immersed in a supportive environment². With this in mind, the above statistics are bolstered by anecdotal evidence and trends. Black students are less likely to report a sense of belonging in physics and more likely to report experiencing feelings of discouragement due to interactions with peers². They report lower levels of confidence and are less likely to view themselves as scientists². When it comes to faculty interaction, they are less likely to feel comfortable approaching professors and report fewer cases of feeling affirmed by faculty². Successful Black faculty describe gatekeeping in hiring processes, whereby groups of predominantly white male physicists are subject to implicit biases and are more likely to accept students or hire faculty who remind them of themselves³.

It is worth noting that this data comes in light of the fact that diversity programs have been continually implemented during the time period of the study. Most of these programs focus on raising awareness of a diversity problem, scraping at the surface instead of digging deeper into the foundations of this issue. Clearly, this approach has fallen short, and we must shift our efforts. The majority of diversity initiatives focus on outlawing certain behaviors, which studies suggest tends to reaffirm biased viewpoints and lead to a decrease in overall diversity⁶. These programs are often viewed as a solution in their own right, although it is clear that simply informing a community that bias exists will not eradicate it. Instead, a more comprehensive approach, geared toward social accountability and increased spaces for voluntary learning and discussion, might garner better results.

On June 10th, a team of leading particle physicists around the world published an open letter calling for a strike, for Black physicists to take a much-needed break from emotional heavy-lifting and non-Black physicists to dive into the self-reflection and conversation that is necessary for such a shift. The authors of the letter stressed, “Importantly, we are not calling for more diversity and inclusion talks and seminars. We are not asking people to sit through another training about implicit bias. We are calling for every member of the community to commit to taking actions that will change the material circumstances of how Black lives are lived to work toward ending the white supremacy that not only snuffs out Black physicist dreams but destroys whole Black lives.”

“…We are calling for every member of the community to commit to taking actions that will change the material circumstances of how Black lives are lived — to work toward ending the white supremacy that not only snuffs out Black physicist dreams but destroys whole Black lives.” -Strike for Black Lives

Black academics, including many physicists, took to Twitter to detail their experiences under the hashtag #Blackintheivory. These stories painted a poignant picture of discrimination: being told that an acceptance to a prestigious program was only because “there were no Black women in physics,” being required to show ID before entering the physics building on campus, being told to “keep your head down” in response to complaints of discrimination, and getting incredulous looks from professors in response to requests for letters of recommendation. Microaggressions — brief and commonplace derisions, derogatory terms, or insults toward a group of people — such as these are often described as being poked repeatedly. At first, it’s annoying but tolerable, but over time it becomes increasingly unbearable. We are forcing Black students and faculty to constantly explain themselves, justify their presence, and prove themselves far more than any other group. While we all deal with the physics problem sets, experiments, and papers that are immediately in front of us, we need to recognize the further pressures that exist for Black students and faculty. It is much more difficult to focus on a physics problem when your society or department questions your right to be where you are. In the hierarchy of needs, it’s obvious which comes first.

Physicists, I’ve observed, are especially proud of the field they study. And rightfully so — we tackle some of the deepest, most fundamental questions the universe has to offer. Yet this can breed a culture of arrogance and “lone genius” stereotypes, with brilliant idolized individuals often being white older males. In an age of physics that is increasingly reliant upon large collaborations such as CERN and LIGO, this is not only inaccurate but actively harmful. The vast majority of research is done in teams, and creating a space where team members can feel comfortable is paramount to its success. Often, we can put on a show of being bastions of intellectual superiority, which only pushes away students who are not as confident in their abilities or who look around the room and see nobody else like them in it.

Further, some academics use this proclaimed superiority to argue their way around any issues of diversity and inclusion, choosing to see the data (such as GPA or test scores) without considering the context. Physicists tend to tackle problems in an inherently academic, systematic fashion. We often remove ourselves from consideration because we want physics to stick to a scientific method free from bias on behalf of the experimenter. Yet physics, as a human activity undertaken by groups of individuals from a society, cannot be fully separated from the society in which it is practiced. We need to consider: Who determines allocation of funding? Who determines which students are admitted, or which faculty are hired?

In order to fully transform the systems that leave Black students and faculty in physics underrepresented, unsupported, and even blatantly pushed out of the field, we must do the internal work as individuals and as departments to recognize harmful actions and put new systems in place to overturn these policies. With that in mind, what is the way forward? While there may be an increase in current momentum for action on this issue, it is critical to find a sustainable solution. This requires having difficult conversations and building accountability in the long term by creating or joining a working group within a department focused on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts. These types of fundamental changes are not possible without more widespread involvement; often, the burden of changing the system often falls on members of minority groups. The TEAM-UP report published several recommendations, centered on several categories including the creation of a resource guide, re-evaluating harassment response, and collecting data in an ongoing fashion. Further, Black scientists have long urged for the following actions⁷:

1. The creation of opportunities for discussion amongst colleagues on these issues. This could be accomplished through working groups or reading groups within departments. The key is having a space solely focused on learning more deeply about EDI.
2. Commitments to bold hiring practices, including cluster hiring. This occurs when multiple Black faculty members are hired at once, in order to decrease the isolation that occurs from being the sole Black member of a department.
3. The creation of a welcoming environment. This one is trickier, given that the phrase “welcoming environment” means something different to different people. An easier way to get a feel for this is by collecting data within a department, of both satisfaction and any personal stories or comments students or faculty would like to report. This also requires an examination of microaggressions and general attitudes toward Black members of a department, as an invite to the table could also be a case of tokenization.
4. A commitment to transparency. Research has shown that needing to explain hiring decisions to a group leads to a decrease in bias⁶.

While this is by no means a comprehensive list, there are concrete places for all of us to start.

References:

## First Evidence the Higgs Talks to Other Generations

Article Titles: “Measurement of Higgs boson decay to a pair of muons in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(S) = 13 TeV” and “A search for the dimuon decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector”

Authors: The CMS Collaboration and The ATLAS Collaboration, respectively

References: CDS: CMS-PAS-HIG-19-006 and arxiv:2007.07830, respectively

Like parents who wonder if millennials have ever read a book by someone outside their generation, physicists have been wondering if the Higgs communicates with matter particles outside the 3rd generation. Since its discovery in 2012, phycists at the LHC experiments have been studying the Higgs in a variety of ways. However despite the fact that matter seems to be structured into 3 distinct ‘generations’ we have so far only seen the Higgs talking to the 3rd generation. In the Standard Model, the different generations of matter are 3 identical copies of the same kinds of particles, just with each generation having heavier masses. Due to the fact that the Higgs interacts with particles in proportion to their mass, this means it has been much easier to measure the Higgs talking to the third and heaviest generation of mater particles. But in order to test whether the Higgs boson really behaves exactly like the Standard Model predicts or has slight deviations -(indicating new physics), it is important to measure its interactions with particles from the other generations too. The 2nd generation particle the Higgs decays most often to is the charm quark, but the experimental difficulty of identifying charm quarks makes this an extremely difficult channel to probe (though it is being tried).

The best candidate for spotting the Higgs talking to the 2nd generation is by looking for the Higgs decaying to two muons which is exactly what ATLAS and CMS both did in their recent publications. However this is no easy task. Besides being notoriously difficult to produce, the Higgs only decays to dimuons two out of every 10,000 times it is produced. Additionally, there is a much larger background of Z bosons decaying to dimuon pairs that further hides the signal.

CMS and ATLAS try to make the most of their data by splitting up events into multiple categories by applying cuts that target different the different ways Higgs bosons are produced: the fusion of two gluons, two vector bosons, two top quarks or radiated from a vector boson. Some of these categories are then further sub-divided to try and squeeze out as much signal as possible. Gluon fusion produces the most Higgs bosons, but it also the hardest to distinguish from the Z boson production background. The vector boson fusion process produces the 2nd most Higgs and is a more distinctive signature so it contributes the most to the overall measurement. In each of these sub-categories a separate machine learning classifier is trained to distinguish Higgs boson decays from background events. All together CMS uses 14 different categories of events and ATLAS uses 20. Backgrounds are estimated using both simulation and data-driven techniques, with slightly different methods in each category. To extract the overall amount of signal present, both CMS and ATLAS fit all of their respective categories at once with a single parameter controlling the strength of a Higgs boson signal.

At the end of the day, CMS and ATLAS are able to report evidence of Higgs decay to dimuons with a significance of 3-sigma and 2-sigma respectively (chalk up 1 point for CMS in their eternal rivalry!). Both of them find an amount of signal in agreement with the Standard Model prediction.

CMS’s first evidence of this decay allows them to measuring the strength of the Higgs coupling to muons as compared to the Standard Model prediction. One can see this latest muon measurement sits right on the Standard Model prediction, and probes the Higgs’ coupling to a particle with much smaller mass than any of the other measurements.

As CMS and ATLAS collect more data and refine their techniques, they will certainly try to push their precision up to the 5-sigma level needed to claim discovery of the Higgs’s interaction with the 2nd generation. They will be on the lookout for any deviations from the expected behavior of the SM Higgs, which could indicate new physics!

Older ATLAS Press Release “ATLAS searches for rare Higgs boson decays into muon pairs

Cern Courier Article “The Higgs adventure: five years in

Particle Bites Post “Studying the Higgs via Top Quark Couplings

Blog Post from Matt Strassler on “How the Higgs Field Works

## A simple matter

Article title: Evidence of A Simple Dark Sector from XENON1T Anomaly

Authors: Cheng-Wei Chiang, Bo-Qiang Lu

Reference: arXiv:2007.06401

As with many anomalies in the high-energy universe, particle physicists are rushed off their feet to come up with new, and often somewhat often complicated models to explain them. With the recent detection of an excess in electron recoil events in the 1-7 keV region from the XENON1T experiment (see Oz’s post in case you missed it), one can ask whether even the simplest of models can even still fit the bill. Although still at 3.5 sigma evidence – not quite yet in the ‘discovery’ realm – there is still great opportunity to test the predictability and robustness of our most rudimentary dark matter ideas.

The paper in question considers would could be one of the simplest dark sectors with the introduction of only two more fundamental particles – a dark photon and a dark fermion. The dark fermion plays the role of the dark matter (or part of it) which communicates with our familiar Standard Model particles, namely the electron, through the dark photon. In the language of particle physics, the dark sector particles actually carries a kind of ‘dark charge’, much like the electron carries what we know as the electric charge. The (almost massless) dark photon is special in the sense that it can interact with both the visible and dark sector – and as opposed to visible photons, and have a very long mean free path able to reach the detector on Earth. An important parameter describing how much the ordinary and dark photon ‘mix’ together is usually described by $\varepsilon$. But how does this fit into the context of the XENON 1T excess?

The idea is that the dark fermions annihilate into pairs of dark photons (seen in Fig. 1) which excite electrons when they hit the detector material, much like a dark version of the photoelectric effect – only much more difficult to observe. The processes above remain exclusive, without annihilating straight to Standard Model particles, as long as the dark matter mass remains less than the lightest charged particle, the electron. With the electron at a few hundred keV, we should be fine in the range of the XENON excess.

What we are ultimately interested in is the rate at which the dark matter interacts with the detector, which in high-energy physics are highly calculable:

$\frac{d R}{d \Delta E}= 1.737 \times 10^{40}\left(f_{\chi} \alpha^{\prime}\right)^{2} \epsilon(E)\left(\frac{\mathrm{keV}}{m_{\chi}}\right)^{4}\left(\frac{\sigma_{\gamma}\left(m_{\chi}\right)}{\mathrm{barns}}\right) \frac{1}{\sqrt{2 \pi} \sigma} e^{-\frac{\left(E-m_{\chi}\right)^{2}}{2 \sigma^{2}}}$

where $f_{\chi}$ is the fraction of dark matter represented by $\chi$, $\alpha'=\varepsilon e^2_{X} / (4\pi)$, $\epsilon(E)$ is the efficiency factor for the XENON 1T experiment and $\sigma_{\gamma}$ is the photoelectric cross section.

Figure 2 shows the favoured regions for the dark fermion explanation fot the XENON excess. The dashed green lines represent only a 1% fraction of dark fermion matter for the universe, whilst the solid lines are to explain the entire dark matter content. Upper limits from the XENON 1T data is shown in blue, with a bunch of other astrophysical contraints (namely red giants, red dwarfs and horizontal branch star) far above the preffered regions.

This plot actually raises another important question: How sensitive are these results to the fraction of dark matter represented by this model? For that we need to specify how the dark matter is actually created in the first place – with the two most probably well-known mechanisms the ‘freeze-out’ and the ‘freeze-in’ (follow the links to previous posts!)

The first important point to note from the above figures is that the freeze-out mechanism doesn’t even depend on the mixing between the visible and dark sector i.e. the vertical axes. However, recall that the relic density in freeze-out is determined by the rate of annihlation into SM fermions – which is of course forbidden here for the mass of fermionic DM. The freeze-in works a little differently since there are two processes that can contribute to populating the relic density of DM: SM charged fermion annihlations and dark photon annihilations. It turns out that the charged fermion channel dominates for larger values of $e_X$ and in of course then becomes insensitive to the mixing parameter $\varepsilon$ and hence dark photon annihilations.

Of course it has been emphasized in previous posts that the only way to really get a good test of these models is with more data. But the advantage of simple models like these are that they are readily available in the physicist’s arsenal when anomalies like these pop up (and they do!)

## Charmonium-onium: A fully charmed tetraquark

Paper Title: Observation of structure in the $J/\psi$-pair mass spectrum

Authors: LHCb Collaboration

Reference: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.16957.pdf

The Announcement

The LHCb collaboration reports a 5-sigma resonance at 6.9 GeV, consistent with predictions of a fully-charmed tetraquark state.

The Background

One of the ways quarks interact with each other is the strong nuclear force. This force is unlike the electroweak or gravitational forces in that the interaction strength increases with the separation between quarks, until it sharply falls off at roughly $10^{-15}$m. We say that the strong force is “confined” due to this sharp drop off. It is also dissimilar to the other forces in that the Strong force is non-perturbative. For perturbation theory to work well, the more complex a Feynman diagram becomes, the less it should contribute to the process. In the strong interaction though, each successive diagram contributes more than the previous one. Despite these challenges, physicists have still made sense organizing the zoo of quarks and bound states that come from particle collisions.

The quark ($q$) model [1,2] classifies hadrons into Mesons ($q \bar{q}$) and Baryons ($qqq$ or $\bar{q}\bar{q}\bar{q}$). It also allows for the existence of exotic hadrons like the tetraquark ($qq\bar{q}\bar{q}$) or pentaquark ($qqq\bar{q}\bar{q}\bar{q}$). The first evidence for an exotic hardon of this nature came in 2003 from the Belle Collaboration [1]. According to the LHCb collaboration, “all hadrons observed to date, including those of exotic nature, contain at most two heavy charm ($c$) or bottom ($b$) quarks, whereas many QCD-motivated phenomenological models also predict the existence of states consisting of four heavy quarks.” In this paper, the LHCb reports evidence of a $cc\bar{c}\bar{c}$ state, the first fully charmed tetraquark state.

The Method

Perhaps the simplest way to form a fully charmed tetraquark state, $T_{ cc \bar{c}\bar{c}}$ from now on, is to form two charmonium states ($J/\psi$) which then themselves form a bound state. This search focuses on pairs of charmonium that are produced from two separate interactions, as opposed to resonant production through a single interaction. This is advantageous because “the distribution of any di-$J/\psi$ observable can be constructed using the kinematics from single $J/\psi$ production.” In other words, independent $J/\psi$ production reduces the amount of work it takes to construct observables.

Once $J/\psi$ is formed, the most useful decay it undergoes is into pairs of muons with about a 6% branching ratio [2]. To form $J/\psi$ candidates, the di-muon invariant mass must be between $3.0 - 3.2$GeV. To form a di-$J/\psi$ candidate, the $T_{ cc \bar{c}\bar{c}}$, all four muons are required to have originated from the same proton-proton collision point. This eliminates the possibility of associating two $J/\psi$s from two different proton collisions.

The Findings

When the dust settles, the LHCb finds a $5-\sigma$ resonance at $m_{\text{di}- J/\psi} = 6905 \pm 11 \pm 7$ MeV with a width of $\Gamma = 80 \pm 19 \pm 33$ MeV. This resonance is just above twice the $J/\psi$ mass.

References

## The XENON1T Excess : The Newest Craze in Particle Physics

Paper: Observation of Excess Electronic Recoil Events in XENON1T

Authors: XENON1T Collaboration

Recently the particle physics world has been abuzz with a new result from the XENON1T experiment who may have seen a revolutionary signal. XENON1T is one of the world’s most sensitive dark matter experiments. The experiment consists of a huge tank of Xenon placed deep underground in the Gran Sasso mine in Italy. It is a ‘direct-detection’ experiment, hunting for very rare signals of dark matter particles from space interacting with their detector. It was originally designed to look for WIMP’s, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, who used to be everyone’s favorite candidate for dark matter. However, given recent null results by WIMP-hunting  direct-detection experiments, and collider experiments at the LHC, physicists have started to broaden their dark matter horizons. Experiments like XENON1T, who were designed to look for heavy WIMP’s colliding off of Xenon nuclei have realized that they can also be very sensitive to much lighter particles by looking for electron recoils. New particles that are much lighter than traditional WIMP’s would not leave much of an impact on large Xenon nuclei, but they can leave a signal in the detector if they instead scatter off of the electrons around those nuclei. These electron recoils can be identified by the ionization and scintillation signals they leave in the detector, allowing them to be distinguished from nuclear recoils.

In this recent result, the XENON1T collaboration searched for these electron recoils in the energy range of 1-200 keV with unprecedented sensitivity.  Their extraordinary sensitivity is due to its exquisite control over backgrounds and extremely low energy threshold for detection. Rather than just being impressed, what has gotten many physicists excited is that the latest data shows an excess of events above expected backgrounds in the 1-7 keV region. The statistical significance of the excess is 3.5 sigma, which in particle physics is enough to claim ‘evidence’ of an anomaly but short of the typical 5-sigma required to claim discovery.

So what might this excess mean? The first, and least fun answer, is nothing. 3.5 sigma is not enough evidence to claim discovery, and those well versed in particle physics history know that there have been numerous excesses with similar significances have faded away with more data. Still it is definitely an intriguing signal, and worthy of further investigation.

The pessimistic explanation is that it is due to some systematic effect or background not yet modeled by the XENON1T collaboration. Many have pointed out that one should be skeptical of signals that appear right at the edge of an experiments energy detection threshold. The so called ‘efficiency turn on’, the function that describes how well an experiment can reconstruct signals right at the edge of detection, can be difficult to model. However, there are good reasons to believe this is not the case here. First of all the events of interest are actually located in the flat part of their efficiency curve (note the background line is flat below the excess), and the excess rises above this flat background. So to explain this excess their efficiency would have to somehow be better at low energies than high energies, which seems very unlikely. Or there would have to be a very strange unaccounted for bias where some higher energy events were mis-reconstructed at lower energies. These explanations seem even more implausible given that the collaboration performed an electron reconstruction calibration using the radioactive decays of Radon-220 over exactly this energy range and were able to model the turn on and detection efficiency very well.

However the possibility of a novel Standard Model background is much more plausible. The XENON collaboration raises the possibility that the excess is due to a previously unobserved background from tritium β-decays. Tritium decays to Helium-3 and an electron and a neutrino with a half-life of around 12 years. The energy released in this decay is 18.6 keV, giving the electron having an average energy of a few keV. The expected energy spectrum of this decay matches the observed excess quite well. Additionally, the amount of contamination needed to explain the signal is exceedingly small. Around 100 parts-per-billion of H2 would lead to enough tritium to explain the signal, which translates to just 3 tritium atoms per kilogram of liquid Xenon. The collaboration tries their best to investigate this possibility, but they neither rule out or confirm such a small amount of tritium contamination. However, other similar contaminants, like diatomic oxygen have been confirmed to be below this level by 2 orders of magnitude, so it is not impossible that they were able to avoid this small amount of contamination.

So while many are placing their money on the tritium explanation, there is the exciting possibility remains that this is our first direct evidence of physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM)! So if the signal really is a new particle or interaction what would it be? Currently it it is quite hard to pin down exactly based on the data. The analysis was specifically searching for two signals that would have shown up in exactly this energy range: axions produced in the sun, and neutrinos produced in the sun interacting with electrons via a large (BSM) magnetic moment. Both of these models provide good fits to the signal shape, with the axion explanation being slightly preferred. However since this result has been released, many have pointed out that these models would actually be in conflict with constraints from astrophysical measurements. In particular, the axion model they searched for would have given stars an additional way to release energy, causing them to cool at a faster rate than in the Standard Model. The strength of interaction between axions and electrons needed to explain the XENON1T excess is incompatible with the observed rates of stellar cooling. There are similar astrophysical constraints on neutrino magnetic moments that also make it unlikely.

This has left door open for theorists to try to come up with new explanations for these excess events, or think of clever ways to alter existing models to avoid these constraints. And theorists are certainly seizing this opportunity! There are new explanations appearing on the arXiv every day, with no sign of stopping. In the roughly 2 weeks since the XENON1T announced their result and this post is being written, there have already been 50 follow up papers! Many of these explanations involve various models of dark matter with some additional twist, such as being heated up in the sun or being boosted to a higher energy in some other way.

So while theorists are currently having their fun with this, the only way we will figure out the true cause of this this anomaly is with more data. The good news is that the XENON collaboration is already preparing for the XENONnT experiment that will serve as a follow to XENON1T. XENONnT will feature a larger active volume of Xenon and a lower background level, allowing them to potentially confirm this anomaly at the 5-sigma level with only a few months of data. If  the excess persists, more data would also allow them to better determine the shape of the signal; allowing them to possibly distinguish between the tritium shape and a potential new physics explanation. If real, other liquid Xenon experiments like LUX and PandaX should also be able to independently confirm the signal in the near future. The next few years should be a very exciting time for these dark matter experiments so stay tuned!

Previous ParticleBites Post on Axion Searches

Blog Post “Hail the XENON Excess”

## Are You Magnetic?

It’s no secret that the face of particle physics lies in the collaboration of scientists all around the world – and for the first time a group of 170 physicists have come to a consensus on one of the most puzzling predictions of the Standard Model muon. The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon concerns the particle’s rotation, or precession, in the presence of a magnetic field. Recall that elementary particles, like the electron and muon, possess intrinsic angular momentum, called spin, and hence indeed behave like a little dipole “bar magnet” – consequently affected by an external magnetic field.

The “classical” version of such an effect comes straight from the Dirac equation, a quantum mechanical framework for relativistic spin-1/2 particles like the electron and muon. It is expressed in terms of the g-factor, where $g=2$ in the Dirac theory. However, more accurate predictions, to compare to with experiment, require more extended calculations in the framework of quantum field theory, with “loops” of virtual particles forming the quantum mechanical corrections. In such a case we of course find deviation from the classical value in what becomes the anomalous magnetic moment with

$a = \frac{g-2}{2}$

For the electron, the prediction coming from Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is so accurate, it actually agrees with the experimental result up to 10 significant figures (side note: in fact, this is not the only thing that agrees very well with experiment from QED, see precision tests of QED).

The muon, however, isn’t so simple and actually gets rather messy. In the Standard Model it comes with three parts, QED, electroweak and hadronic contributions

$a^{SM}_{\mu} = a^{QED}_{\mu}+a^{EW}_{\mu}+a^{hadron}_{\mu}$

Up until now, the accuracy of these calculations have been the subject of a number of collaborations around the world. The largest source (in fact, almost all) of the uncertainty actually comes from the smaller contributions to the magnetic moment, the hadronic part. It is so difficult to estimate that it actually requires input from experimental sources and lattice QCD methods. This review constitutes the most comprehensive report of both the data-driven and lattice methods for hadronic contributions to the muon’s magnetic moment.

Their final result, $a^{SM}_{\mu} = 116591810(43) \times 10^{-11}$ remains 3.7 standard deviations below the current experimental value, measured at Fermilab in Brookhaven National Laboratory. However the most exciting part about all this is the fact that Fermilab is on the brink of releasing a new measurement, with the uncertainties reduced by almost a factor of four compared to the last. And if they don’t agree then? We could be that much closer to confirmation of some new physics in one of the most interesting of places!

1. The new internationally-collaborated calculation: The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon in the Standard model, https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.04822

## A Charming Story

This post is intended to give an overview of the motivation, purpose, and discovery of the charm quark.

### The Problem

The conventional 3-quark (up, down, and strange) models of the weak interaction are inconsistent with weak selection rules. In particular, strangeness-changing $(\Delta S = 2)$ processes as seen in neutral Kaon oscillation $(K_0 \leftrightarrow \bar{K_0} )$ [1]. These processes should be smaller than the predictions obtained from the conventional 3-quark theory. There are two diagrams that contribute to neutral kaon oscillation [2].

In a 3-quark model, the fermion propagators can only be up quark propagators, they both give a positive contribution to the process, and it seems as though we are stuck with these $\Delta S = 2$ oscillations. It would be nice if we could somehow suppress these diagrams.

### Solution

Introduce another up-type quark and one new quantum number called “Charm,” designed to counteract the effects of “Strangeness” carried by the strange quark. With some insight from the future, we will call this new up-type quark the charm quark.

Now, in our 4-quark model (up, down, strange, and charm), we have up and charm quark propagators a cancellation can in-principle occur. First proposed by Glashow, Iliopoulos, and Maiani, this mechanism would later become known as the “GIM Mechanism” [3]. The result is a suppression of these $\Delta S = 2$ processes which is exactly what we need to make the theory consistent with experiments.

### Experimental Evidence

Amusingly, two different experiments reported the same resonance at nearly the same time. In 1974, both the Stanford Linear Accelerator [4] and the Brookhaven National Lab [5] both reported a resonance at 3.1 GeV. SLAC named this particle the $\psi$, and Brookhaven named it the $J$ and thus the $J/ \psi$ particle was born. It turns out that the resonance they detected was “Charmonium,” a bound state of $c \bar{c}$.

### References

[1] – Report on Long Lived K0. This paper experimentally confirms neutral Kaons oscillation.

[2] – Kaon Physics. This powerpoint contains the picture of neutral Kaon oscillation that I used.

[3] – Weak Interactions with Lepton-Hadron Symmetry. This is the paper by Glashow, Iliopoulos, and Maiani that outlines the GIM mechanism.

[4] – Discovery of a Narrow Resonance in e+e Annihilation. This is the SLAC discovery of the $J \psi$ particle.

[5] – Experimental Observation of a Heavy Particle J This is the Brookhaven discovery of the $J \psi$ particle.

[A] – https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.57782. History of Charm Quark

## Dark matter from down under

It isn’t often I get to plug an important experiment in high-energy physics located within my own vast country so I thought I would take this opportunity to do just that. That’s right – the land of the kangaroo, meat-pie and infamously slow internet (68th in the world if I recall) has joined the hunt for the ever elusive dark matter particle.

By now you have probably heard that about 85% of the universe is all made out of stuff that is dark. Searching for this invisible matter has not been an easy task, however the main strategy has involved detections of faint signals of dark matter scattering off nuclei that constantly pass through the Earth unimpeded. Up until now, the main contenders for these dark matter direct detection experiments have been performed above the equator.

The SABRE (Sodium-iodide with Active Background REjection) collaboration plans to operate two detectors – one in my home-state of Victoria, Australia at SUPL (Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory) and another in the northern hemisphere at LNGS, Italy. The choice to run two experiments in seperate hemispheres has the goal of potentially removing systematic effects inherent in the seasonal rotation of the Earth. In particular – any of these seasonal effects should be opposite in phase, whilst the dark matter signal should remain the same. This actually takes us to a novel dark matter direct detection search method known as annual modulation, which has been added to the spotlight through the DAMA/LIBRA scintillation detector underground the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy.

#### Around the world, around the world

The DAMA/LIBRA experiment superseded the DAMA/NaI experiment which observed the dark matter halo over a period of 7 annual cycles ranging from 1995 to 2002. The idea is quite simple really. Current theory suggests that the Milky Way galaxy is surrounded by a halo of dark matter with our solar system casually floating by experiencing some “flux” of particles that pass through us all year round. However, current and past theory (up to a point) also suggest the Earth does a full revolution around the sun in a year’s time. In fact, with respect to this dark matter “wind”, the Earth’s relative velocity would be added on its approach, occurring around the start of June and then subtracted on its recession, in December. When studying detector interactions with the DM particles, one would then expect the rates to be higher in the middle of the year and of course lower at the end – hence a modulation (annually). Up to here, annual modulation results would be quite suitably model-independent and so wouldn’t depend on your particular choice of DM particle – so long as it has some interaction with the detector.

The DAMA collaboration, having reported almost 14 years of annual modulation results in total, claim evidence for a picture quite consistent with what would be expected for a range of dark matter scenarios in the energy range of 2-6 keV. This however has long been in tension with the wider community of detection for WIMP dark matter. Those such as XENON (which incidentally is also located in the Gran Sasso mountains) and CDMS have reported no detection of dark matter in the same ranges as that which the DAMA collaboration claimed to have seen them. Although these employ quite different materials such as (you guessed it) liquid xenon in the case of XENON and cryogenically cooled semiconductors at CDMS.

Yes, there is also the COSINE-100 experiment, using the same materials as those in DAMA (that is, sodium iodide), based in South Korea. And yes, they also published a letter to Nature claiming their results to be in “severe tension” with those of the DAMA annual modulation signal – under the assumption of WIMP interactions that are spin-independent with the detector material. However, this does not totally rule out the observation of dark matter by DAMA – just the fact that it is very unlikely to correspond to the gold-standard WIMP in a standard halo scenario. According to the collaboration, it will certainly take years more data collection to know for sure. But that’s where SABRE comes in!

#### As above, so below

Before the arrival of SABRE’s twin detectors in both the northern and southern hemispheres, the first phase known as the PoP (Proof of Principle) must be performed to analyze the entire search strategy and evaluate the backgrounds present in the crystal structures. Certainly, another feature of SABRE is a crystal background rate quite below that of DAMA/LIBRA using ultra-radiopure sodium iodide crystals. With the estimated current background and 50 kg of detector material, it is expected that the DAMA/LIBRA signal should be able to be independently verified (or refuted) in a matter of 3 years.

If you asked me, there is something a little special about an experiment operating on the frontier of fundamental physics in a small regional Victorian town with a population just over 6000 known for an active gold mining community and the oldest running foot race in Australia. Of course, Stawell features just the right environment to shield the detector from the relentless bombardment of cosmic rays on the Earth’s surface – and that’s why it is located 1 km underground. In fact, radiation contamination is such a prevalent issue for these sensitive detectors that everything from the concrete to the metal bolts that go in them must first be tested – and all this at the same time as the mine is still being operated.

Now, not only is SABRE experiments running in both Australia and Italy, but they actually comprise a collaboration of physicists also from the UK and the USA. But most importantly (for me, anyway) – this is the southern hemisphere’s very first dark matter detector – a great milestone and a fantastic opportunity to put Aussies in the pilot’s seat to uncover one of nature’s biggest mysteries. But for now, crack open a cold one – footy’s almost on!