Weakly Supervised Anomaly Detection in Events with a Higgs Boson and Exotic Physics

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Cheng, Chi Lung, Demers, Sarah, Diefenbacher, Sascha, Li, Runze, Nachman, Benjamin, Noll, Dennis
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Cheng, Chi Lung
Demers, Sarah
Diefenbacher, Sascha
Li, Runze
Nachman, Benjamin
Noll, Dennis
author_facet Cheng, Chi Lung
Demers, Sarah
Diefenbacher, Sascha
Li, Runze
Nachman, Benjamin
Noll, Dennis
contents We present a machine learning-based anomaly detection strategy designed to identify anomalous physics in events containing resonant Standard Model physics and demonstrate this method on the final state of a Higgs boson decaying to two photons. The demonstration targets high-dimensional deviations in the region of phase space containing the Higgs mass peak in a fully signal-agnostic manner. A latent-space embedding, learned from event kinematics, enables the use of a large set of potentially sensitive features. Backgrounds are estimated using a hybrid approach that combines machine learning-based generative modelling with traditional simulation, and a discriminator is trained in the latent space to distinguish data from background estimates. After applying a selection on the classifier output, the invariant mass distribution of the diphoton system is examined for localized excesses above the simulated Higgs peak. We benchmark the sensitivity of this strategy using simplified simulated proton-proton collisions corresponding to data recorded during Run 2 of the LHC, and show that the method can provide significant improvements in sensitivity, even for small signal injections that could remain undetected in an inclusive analysis. These results demonstrate that the proposed strategy is a promising and viable approach for future searches and should be applied to recorded collider data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_13566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Weakly Supervised Anomaly Detection in Events with a Higgs Boson and Exotic Physics
Cheng, Chi Lung
Demers, Sarah
Diefenbacher, Sascha
Li, Runze
Nachman, Benjamin
Noll, Dennis
High Energy Physics - Experiment
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
We present a machine learning-based anomaly detection strategy designed to identify anomalous physics in events containing resonant Standard Model physics and demonstrate this method on the final state of a Higgs boson decaying to two photons. The demonstration targets high-dimensional deviations in the region of phase space containing the Higgs mass peak in a fully signal-agnostic manner. A latent-space embedding, learned from event kinematics, enables the use of a large set of potentially sensitive features. Backgrounds are estimated using a hybrid approach that combines machine learning-based generative modelling with traditional simulation, and a discriminator is trained in the latent space to distinguish data from background estimates. After applying a selection on the classifier output, the invariant mass distribution of the diphoton system is examined for localized excesses above the simulated Higgs peak. We benchmark the sensitivity of this strategy using simplified simulated proton-proton collisions corresponding to data recorded during Run 2 of the LHC, and show that the method can provide significant improvements in sensitivity, even for small signal injections that could remain undetected in an inclusive analysis. These results demonstrate that the proposed strategy is a promising and viable approach for future searches and should be applied to recorded collider data.
title Weakly Supervised Anomaly Detection in Events with a Higgs Boson and Exotic Physics
topic High Energy Physics - Experiment
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13566