https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-024-05028-y
Regular Article
Autoencoders for real-time SUEP detection
1
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Meyrin, Switzerland
2
Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), London, UK
3
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
4
Imperial College, London, UK
5
ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
6
Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Received:
25
November
2023
Accepted:
26
January
2024
Published online:
22
March
2024
Confining dark sectors with pseudo-conformal dynamics can produce Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns (SUEP), at the Large Hadron Collider: the production of dark quarks in proton–proton collisions leading to a dark shower and the high-multiplicity production of dark hadrons. The final experimental signature is spherically symmetric energy deposits by an anomalously large number of soft Standard Model particles with a transverse energy of O(100). Assuming Yukawa-like couplings of the scalar portal state, the dominant production mode is gluon fusion, and the dominant background comes from multi-jet QCD events. We have developed a deep learning-based Anomaly Detection technique to reject QCD jets and identify any anomalous signature, including SUEP, in real-time in the High-Level Trigger system of experiments like the Compact Muon Solenoid at the Large Hadron Collider. A deep convolutional neural autoencoder network has been trained using QCD events by taking transverse energy deposits in the inner tracker, electromagnetic calorimeter, and hadron calorimeter sub-detectors as 3-channel image data. Due to the sparse nature of the data, only 0.5% of the total image pixels have nonzero values. To tackle this challenge, a nonstandard loss function, the inverse of the so-called Dice Loss, is exploited. The trained autoencoder with learned spatial features of QCD jets can detect 40% of the SUEP events, with a QCD event mistagging rate as low as 2%. The model inference time has been measured using the Intel® Core i5-9600KF processor and found to be , which perfectly satisfies the High-Level Trigger system’s latency of . Given the virtue of the unsupervised learning of the autoencoders, the trained model can be applied to any new physics model that predicts an experimental signature anomalous to QCD jets.
© The Author(s) 2024
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