Events During the Week of May 29th through June 5th, 2022
Monday, May 30th, 2022
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, May 31st, 2022
- Academic Calendar
- 3 week summer session begins
- Abstract: *Note: actual end time may vary.*
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022
- Physics ∩ ML Seminar
- Weak Supervision for the Strong Force
- Time: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
- Place: Online Seminar: Please sign up for our mailing list at www.physicsmeetsml.org for zoom link. We will also livestream the talk in Chamberlin 5280.
- Speaker: Jesse Thaler, MIT/IAIFI
- Abstract: The strong nuclear force is governed by the interactions of quarks and gluons. Because of confinement, though, quarks and gluons can never been seen in isolation, so “quark” and “gluon” labels are fundamentally ambiguous. In this talk, I show how to leverage weak supervision to disentangle quarks and gluons without labeled training data. This technique is then applied to public data from the Large Hadron Collider. This analysis incorporates a wide range of machine learning tools — including topic modeling, permutation-invariant networks, simulation-based inference, and optimal transport — together with key insights from quantum field theory.
- Physics Summer Fun
- Outdoor Recess
- Time: 12:30 pm - 1:00 pm
- Place: Bascom Hill
- Speaker: Sharon Kahn
- Abstract: We hope you’ll take a 20-30 minute break on (some/all) Wednesdays this summer (12:30-1pm) to come play outside together! We’ve arranged to borrow some lawn games from the L&S dean’s office and will likely bring along a frisbee and/or a hackeysack, too. Feel free to come play or just hang out!
In case of rain, we’ll meet indoors (5310 CH) for board games. If that happens, we’ll send an update via email by 10am. Thursday, June 2nd, 2022
- NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
- Impact of intrinsic charm in the nucleon and gluon saturation effects on the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux for IceCube
- Time: 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
- Place:
- Speaker: Rafał Maciuła, Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
- Abstract: The predictions for the atmospheric neutrino flux at high energies strongly depend on the contribution of prompt neutrinos, which are determined by the production of charmed mesons in the atmosphere at very forward rapidities. In this seminar I will present our estimations of the related cross sections, recently obtained and discussed taking into account the presence of an intrinsic charm (IC) component in the proton wave function and the QCD dynamics modified by the onset of saturation effects. In this study the impact on the predictions for the prompt neutrino flux is investigated assuming different values for the probability to find the IC in the nucleon (Pic). We demonstrate that for Pic ∼ 1%, the IC component dominates the high-energy prompt neutrino flux. A first comparison with the IceCube data is performed and upper limits on the amount of IC are obtained for the linear and nonlinear descriptions of the QCD dynamics.
- Host: Lu Lu
Friday, June 3rd, 2022
- Thesis Defense
- Precision Higgs to τ measurements, and searches using Higgs to τ final states at the Compact Muon Solenoid
- Time: 11:00 am - 6:00 pm
- Place: Chamberlin Hall 4274
- Speaker: Andrew Loeliger , Physics PhD Graduate Student
- Abstract: This thesis describes two precision measurements of Higgs boson to tau lepton decays, using the CMS detector at the CERN LHC. Two analyses have performed using two different analysis goals/schemes. The first using the "Simplified Template Cross Section" scheme, the second a more general differential analysis scheme. Both analyses use the complete Run 2 dataset of the LHC. Developments to use Higgs to taus as a final state to search for high mass resonances in boosted topologies are also discussed, including adaptation of a machine learning technique for specially reconstructed boosted Higgs to tau topologies.
- Host: Tulika Bose