Shape-constrained unfolding

by Mikael Kuusela

In an earlier blog post, Tommaso challenged me to write about a new unfolding method I’ve developed together with Philip Stark. Before describing the new method, I should first explain what the unfolding problem is and why it is a tough problem to solve.

On (di)Higgs searches …

Hello! Last week I was at the workshop hh searches with CMS, which was organized in Lyon by the IPNL (Institute de Physique Nucleaire de Lyon).

One idea to test

In the last post, I mentioned one problem connected to the use of a classification tool to discriminate a new particle signal from backgrounds. The case is the search for production of Higgs boson pairs, which may decay (36% of the time) into a final state including four b-quarks.

Wishing for a meta-MVA

In high-energy physics problems, one usually encounters the need of discriminating the signal one wants to study – typically a new physical process yet to be discovered – from a background constituted by known processes.

First week in Belgium: impressions and a little bit of MEM

To change the place to live, habits, home is always as exciting as traumatic. This is why today I want to tell you about my first days in Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium, the city where I will do most of my work during the years of my PhD career.

Highlights from HEP16

I had the pleasure of visiting Valparaiso (Chile) last week for a conference called “High-Energy Physics in the LHC era“, the sixth of the series. I was invited last August by the organizers to present the status of physics searches and perspectives of the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, and I took the chance to visit Chile for the first time.

Theories Compared by Number of Papers

Alexander Belyaev gave an inspiring talk at the HEP2016 conference in Valparaiso today. His talk was titled “Interplay of the LHC and DM search in unravelling natural SUSY”. I cannot report his talk here, but I wish to steal a very interesting graph from his presentation.

Boosting Higgs pair production in the bƃbƃ final state with multivariate techniques

by Juan Rojo

Juan Rojo is a member of the Oxford University node of the AMVA4NewPhysics network. In this post he presents a recent study carried out by a group of theoretical and experimental physicists of the Oxford University. 

b-tagging 101

Ciao! Hope you found enjoyable things to do these days!

In my first blog post, I mentioned that b-tagging surely deserved a post on its own in this blog. As you already know or will understand after reading the following paragraphs, this tool is thoroughly used in high energy physics data analyses.