I created a tool that watches how many plots DZERO, CDF, ATLAS, and CMS release as a function of time. Here are the results for this year (each little square is a plot):
I’m going to call that bump in July there the ICHEP effect.
Showing posts with label CMS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CMS. Show all posts
Friday, July 30, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
The CMS Momentum Scale And Resolution
While the focus of the international conference in high-energy physics in Paris last week has been on the search for new physics and the precise measurement of standard model quantities, I will offer to you today something more technical, but in no way less physics-rich; it was presented in Paris, but with the many parallel sessions it may have well gone unnoticed... What I wish to explain to you is the procedure by means of which the CMS experiments calibrates the scale and resolution of its charged particle momentum measurement.
The dull sound of the topic as stated above should not deceive you: this is a really exciting, interesting technology, which allows the measurement of physical quantities with high precision. Since the M in CMS stands for "muon", we certainly care for the precise measurement of muons -and muons are the particles used for the calibration procedure.
What happens when a charged particle leaves ionization deposits ("hits") in the silicon tracking system is that we can reconstruct its trajectory, forming a track. The track is curved in the plane transverse to the beam, because the S in "CMS" stands for "solenoid", a big cylinder that provides a B= 3.8 Tesla magnetic field within its volume. If you know what the Lorentz force is, you might also remember the formula P = 0.3 B R, expressing the proportionality of the momentum of a charged particle and its curvature in a magnetic field. This demands that within the CMS solenoid a P = 1.14 GeV muon follow a curved trajectory, which resembles a circle of radius R = 1 meter if observed in the "transverse" plane to the beam axis, the one along which the solenoid is symmetrical. By measuring the curvature, we determine the transverse momentum!
Things are always complicated if you want perfection. We of course can measure the position of the silicon hits with extreme accuracy, but alignment and positioning errors may create imperfections in the measurement of the track curvature. We also know the magnetic field with high accuracy, through Hall probes and other means, but imprecisions will affect the momentum measurement. Finally, the amount of material of which the tracking detector is composed affects the trajectory, producing further imprecisions if our map of the material is not perfect.
In the end, all the effects and all the details of the geometry of our detector are encoded in a carefully crafted simulation. With the simulation we can figure out what a 1-GeV track would look like, given our reconstruction and our assumptions about geometry, material, and magnetic field. But we need real data to verify that our model is correct, and to tune it in case it is not!
Real data: we now have it. CMS uses resonance decays to opposite-charge particles for this business: they are easy to identify, have little background, and there are plenty to play with. In particular, we use J/Psi meson decays to muon pairs for some of the checks of the momentum scale and resolution. Other dimuon resonances are also used -there is a large amount of such decays already available in the data so far collected- but here I will only discuss what CMS did with its J/Psi signal.
The dimuon mass spectrum in the vicinity of the nominal J/Psi mass value is shown in the picture below. A large number of signal events is observed. These events can be used to calibrate the momentum scale.
If one looks closely, one observes that the measured mass is very slightly lower than the nominal 3.097 GeV. This is already evidence for a very small underestimation of the momentum scale. To dig further, a simple thing one can do is to divide the J/Psi events depending on the value of the particle's reconstructed momentum or rapidity, measuring the mass in all sub-samples to check if in particular kinematical regions there is a bias. The bias, of course, would arise from the momentum reconstruction of the individual muons; but if one only measures the mass, which is a quantity constructed with the measurement of two muons, surely only an "average" bias can be detected, right ?
Wrong. Each muon from the decay of each J/Psi has a different momentum, travels through different parts of the detector, and is subjected to different reconstruction biases: we can turn these differences to our advantage. What we can do is to assume we know the functional form of these biases, and plug them into a likelihood function.
A further benefit with respect to methods I have seen in the past for the correction of scale biases is that a well-written likelihood function is also capable of extracting the momentum resolution from the same set of data. One just needs to produce a functional form (whose exact shape is suggested by simulation studies) that describes how the resolution on the momentum depends on the track kinematics; then, the likelihood fit will take care of finding the best parameters of the resolution function as well, by comparing the expected lineshape of the resonance with the mass value measured for each particle decay.
The likelihood is very complicated, because it accounts for the dependence of the mass on the muon momenta and the resolutions, and momenta and resolution in turn are functional forms of bias parameters. I know very well the code of this likelihood function, and I can tell you it is not for everybody! So I will abstain for once from finding a suitable analogy, lest I squeeze my brains for the rest of the evening. Let me just say that in the end, the likelihood maximization produces the most likely value of the parameters describing the bias functions, allowing a correction of the bias in the track momentum measurement!
Maybe it is best to show a couple of figures. The first one below shows the average mass of the J/Psi meson as a function of the pseudorapidity of the muons from its decay. The hatched red line shows the true value of the J/Psi mass; but more meaningful are the crosses, which show what should be measured with a perfect detector, given the fitting procedure (which, I am bound to specify, assumes that the lineshape follows a Crystal Ball form). The crosses are our "target": if we measure a mass in agreement with them, given our fitting procedure to extract the mass, our momentum scale is perfect.
In blue you can see that the mass, before corrections, is biased low, especially at high rapidity. Instead, after the likelihood maximization and the correction procedure, we obtain the purple crosses. The agreement with the black crosses is still not perfect, and the statistics is too poor to detect further small deviations, but the demonstration of the validity of the procedure is clear!
And then, the resolution. This is also a function of rapidity in CMS, due to the way the detector is built and the decay geometry. The figure below shows what resolution we expected to measure as a function of rapidity, from simulated J/Psi decays (in black), given the measurement method.
In red the figure also shows what the true resolution is, from simulated muons that are then compared to reconstructed ones. In blue, the band shows what instead CMS measured. The agreement between data and simulation is encouraging, and the result demonstrates the validity of the method. This functional form and its parameters are extracted from the way the reconstructed masses of J/Psi decays distribute around the nominal mass, accounting for the fact that muons in those events have different rapidity: the likelihood knows all the details, and produces a very complete answer to our question.
I think the method is very powerful and I cannot wait to see it applied to all resonances together, with more data -the different dimuon resonances have different kinematics and produce muons of widely varied momenta, allowing a very complete picture of the calibration and resolution of the CMS detector!
The dull sound of the topic as stated above should not deceive you: this is a really exciting, interesting technology, which allows the measurement of physical quantities with high precision. Since the M in CMS stands for "muon", we certainly care for the precise measurement of muons -and muons are the particles used for the calibration procedure.
What happens when a charged particle leaves ionization deposits ("hits") in the silicon tracking system is that we can reconstruct its trajectory, forming a track. The track is curved in the plane transverse to the beam, because the S in "CMS" stands for "solenoid", a big cylinder that provides a B= 3.8 Tesla magnetic field within its volume. If you know what the Lorentz force is, you might also remember the formula P = 0.3 B R, expressing the proportionality of the momentum of a charged particle and its curvature in a magnetic field. This demands that within the CMS solenoid a P = 1.14 GeV muon follow a curved trajectory, which resembles a circle of radius R = 1 meter if observed in the "transverse" plane to the beam axis, the one along which the solenoid is symmetrical. By measuring the curvature, we determine the transverse momentum!
Things are always complicated if you want perfection. We of course can measure the position of the silicon hits with extreme accuracy, but alignment and positioning errors may create imperfections in the measurement of the track curvature. We also know the magnetic field with high accuracy, through Hall probes and other means, but imprecisions will affect the momentum measurement. Finally, the amount of material of which the tracking detector is composed affects the trajectory, producing further imprecisions if our map of the material is not perfect.
In the end, all the effects and all the details of the geometry of our detector are encoded in a carefully crafted simulation. With the simulation we can figure out what a 1-GeV track would look like, given our reconstruction and our assumptions about geometry, material, and magnetic field. But we need real data to verify that our model is correct, and to tune it in case it is not!
Real data: we now have it. CMS uses resonance decays to opposite-charge particles for this business: they are easy to identify, have little background, and there are plenty to play with. In particular, we use J/Psi meson decays to muon pairs for some of the checks of the momentum scale and resolution. Other dimuon resonances are also used -there is a large amount of such decays already available in the data so far collected- but here I will only discuss what CMS did with its J/Psi signal.
The dimuon mass spectrum in the vicinity of the nominal J/Psi mass value is shown in the picture below. A large number of signal events is observed. These events can be used to calibrate the momentum scale.
If one looks closely, one observes that the measured mass is very slightly lower than the nominal 3.097 GeV. This is already evidence for a very small underestimation of the momentum scale. To dig further, a simple thing one can do is to divide the J/Psi events depending on the value of the particle's reconstructed momentum or rapidity, measuring the mass in all sub-samples to check if in particular kinematical regions there is a bias. The bias, of course, would arise from the momentum reconstruction of the individual muons; but if one only measures the mass, which is a quantity constructed with the measurement of two muons, surely only an "average" bias can be detected, right ?
Wrong. Each muon from the decay of each J/Psi has a different momentum, travels through different parts of the detector, and is subjected to different reconstruction biases: we can turn these differences to our advantage. What we can do is to assume we know the functional form of these biases, and plug them into a likelihood function.
A further benefit with respect to methods I have seen in the past for the correction of scale biases is that a well-written likelihood function is also capable of extracting the momentum resolution from the same set of data. One just needs to produce a functional form (whose exact shape is suggested by simulation studies) that describes how the resolution on the momentum depends on the track kinematics; then, the likelihood fit will take care of finding the best parameters of the resolution function as well, by comparing the expected lineshape of the resonance with the mass value measured for each particle decay.
The likelihood is very complicated, because it accounts for the dependence of the mass on the muon momenta and the resolutions, and momenta and resolution in turn are functional forms of bias parameters. I know very well the code of this likelihood function, and I can tell you it is not for everybody! So I will abstain for once from finding a suitable analogy, lest I squeeze my brains for the rest of the evening. Let me just say that in the end, the likelihood maximization produces the most likely value of the parameters describing the bias functions, allowing a correction of the bias in the track momentum measurement!
Maybe it is best to show a couple of figures. The first one below shows the average mass of the J/Psi meson as a function of the pseudorapidity of the muons from its decay. The hatched red line shows the true value of the J/Psi mass; but more meaningful are the crosses, which show what should be measured with a perfect detector, given the fitting procedure (which, I am bound to specify, assumes that the lineshape follows a Crystal Ball form). The crosses are our "target": if we measure a mass in agreement with them, given our fitting procedure to extract the mass, our momentum scale is perfect.
In blue you can see that the mass, before corrections, is biased low, especially at high rapidity. Instead, after the likelihood maximization and the correction procedure, we obtain the purple crosses. The agreement with the black crosses is still not perfect, and the statistics is too poor to detect further small deviations, but the demonstration of the validity of the procedure is clear!
And then, the resolution. This is also a function of rapidity in CMS, due to the way the detector is built and the decay geometry. The figure below shows what resolution we expected to measure as a function of rapidity, from simulated J/Psi decays (in black), given the measurement method.
In red the figure also shows what the true resolution is, from simulated muons that are then compared to reconstructed ones. In blue, the band shows what instead CMS measured. The agreement between data and simulation is encouraging, and the result demonstrates the validity of the method. This functional form and its parameters are extracted from the way the reconstructed masses of J/Psi decays distribute around the nominal mass, accounting for the fact that muons in those events have different rapidity: the likelihood knows all the details, and produces a very complete answer to our question.
I think the method is very powerful and I cannot wait to see it applied to all resonances together, with more data -the different dimuon resonances have different kinematics and produce muons of widely varied momenta, allowing a very complete picture of the calibration and resolution of the CMS detector!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
A Spectroscopist's Delight!
While everybody is busy discussing the latest Tevatron results on the Higgs boson searches -is that the light-mass excess the internet was abuzz, is it consistent with a signal as we expected it, how long will it take to confirm it is not a fluke, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera- I think I have a different plot with which to enthuse you.
If you do not like the figure below, courtesy CMS Collaboration 2010, you are kindly requested to leave this blog and spend your time reading something else than fundamental physics. I do not know what will ever make you believe particle physics is beautiful, if not what is shown here.
The figure shows, using a logarithmic scale on both axes, the reconstructed mass of pairs of muon candidates of opposite charge, collected by CMS in its first 280 inverse nanobarns of 7-TeV proton-proton collisions collected until a week ago. Nothing fancy has been done to prettify this graph: these are honest-to-god muon pairs, as Nature (the bitch, not the magazine) has produced them in the core of CMS. True, the interecession of a detector and a reconstruction software were needed to go from ionization clouds to event counts; but this is the absolute minimum of manipulation you can ever expect from particle signals.
Now, what should enthuse you about the graph is the following. The distribution reveals, clearer than a million words could describe, the structure of all the most important bound states decaying by electroweak interactions into pairs of muons which we can produce in hadron collisions. We immediately spot the Z boson on the far right, and the towering peak of J/Psi mesons; but we also see Upsilon mesons, and at lower energy, we detect the ligher resonance decays of rhos, omegas, and phi mesons. What a spectroscopist's delight! This figure is tremendously informative! If we sent it to outer space, without labels or units, no intelligent race could ever mistake its meaning!
You also notice that these jewels stand atop a background of unidentified muon pairs. Muons can be produced singly by the weak decay of kaons and pions, for instance, or even more massive states like bottom and charm. Occasionally, pairs of muons of opposite charge can emerge that do not have the same parent: the frequent production of these uncorrelated pairs creates the significant backgrounds you see in the picture. Note, however, how these backgrounds die out for large dimuon masses: the Z boson is basically background-free, a fact I have noted in my previous posting here.
As these pages testify, CMS and ATLAS have presented scores of interesting physics results at ICHEP this week. None of those were groundbreaking ones; a few were significant advances, though, and many others were just meant to demonstrate that the experiments are ready for big challenges, such as discovering new physics, the Higgs, measuring the top mass better than the Tevatron, etcetera. The presented results took about a hundred man-years to produce, and I have a lot of respect for them -not to mention the fact that I did my little bit to contribute. But it is my humble opinion that the graph shown above could well be the one to single out and attach on the bulletin board of all the universities and institutes participating in the LHC experiments!
If you do not like the figure below, courtesy CMS Collaboration 2010, you are kindly requested to leave this blog and spend your time reading something else than fundamental physics. I do not know what will ever make you believe particle physics is beautiful, if not what is shown here.
The figure shows, using a logarithmic scale on both axes, the reconstructed mass of pairs of muon candidates of opposite charge, collected by CMS in its first 280 inverse nanobarns of 7-TeV proton-proton collisions collected until a week ago. Nothing fancy has been done to prettify this graph: these are honest-to-god muon pairs, as Nature (the bitch, not the magazine) has produced them in the core of CMS. True, the interecession of a detector and a reconstruction software were needed to go from ionization clouds to event counts; but this is the absolute minimum of manipulation you can ever expect from particle signals.
Now, what should enthuse you about the graph is the following. The distribution reveals, clearer than a million words could describe, the structure of all the most important bound states decaying by electroweak interactions into pairs of muons which we can produce in hadron collisions. We immediately spot the Z boson on the far right, and the towering peak of J/Psi mesons; but we also see Upsilon mesons, and at lower energy, we detect the ligher resonance decays of rhos, omegas, and phi mesons. What a spectroscopist's delight! This figure is tremendously informative! If we sent it to outer space, without labels or units, no intelligent race could ever mistake its meaning!
You also notice that these jewels stand atop a background of unidentified muon pairs. Muons can be produced singly by the weak decay of kaons and pions, for instance, or even more massive states like bottom and charm. Occasionally, pairs of muons of opposite charge can emerge that do not have the same parent: the frequent production of these uncorrelated pairs creates the significant backgrounds you see in the picture. Note, however, how these backgrounds die out for large dimuon masses: the Z boson is basically background-free, a fact I have noted in my previous posting here.
As these pages testify, CMS and ATLAS have presented scores of interesting physics results at ICHEP this week. None of those were groundbreaking ones; a few were significant advances, though, and many others were just meant to demonstrate that the experiments are ready for big challenges, such as discovering new physics, the Higgs, measuring the top mass better than the Tevatron, etcetera. The presented results took about a hundred man-years to produce, and I have a lot of respect for them -not to mention the fact that I did my little bit to contribute. But it is my humble opinion that the graph shown above could well be the one to single out and attach on the bulletin board of all the universities and institutes participating in the LHC experiments!
Monday, July 26, 2010
The present and future of the LHC
Today's been a hectic day: between Sarkozy's speech, the press conference, and the lack of wireless internet in the auditorium where the plenary talks are being held, there's been little time to blog. So any time I've been able to grab during coffee breaks has been spent uploading blog entries to my usual haunt, symmetry breaking. There you can read about the 10-year plan for LHC running and whether or not it might affect some Tevatron scientists' hopes to run their accelerator for a further three years. Plus my take on the new measurements reported by the LHC experiments at ICHEP, such as the W cross section measurements at 7 TeV, and the limits ATLAS and CMS have placed on some exotic physics. (Keep in mind that symmetry is for a more general audience; my fellow ICHEP bloggers have covered those results in much more detail here.)
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Day 3: jets!
Saturday sessions were not really well attended. if we exclude the one on CP violation, CKM and Rare Decays that succeed in packing a lot of people in one of the smaller rooms. Maybe the average ICHEP participant decided to make the grasse matinee, or simply to be a tourist in the City of Light in a very nice and sunny day. Still, in the semi-empty rooms there were lots of interesting things to be learned.
For instance, I was eager to attend the session on Perturbative QCD, Jets and Diffractive Physics: partly because some of the results I have been working on in the last months were presented there, partly because I wanted to know how CMS was doing on the same subject, but mainly because I wanted to know how the LHC experiments are doing on the jet measurements. Jets are in fact copiously produced in the 7 TeV LHC collisions, and even with the not huge amount of data we have collected up to not, ATLAS and CMS are in fact already capable to make nice measurements, and, in a sense, already unique ones.
I was not disappointed: Tancredi, that was presenting the jet measurements for ATLAS, opened his talk with a nice historical reminders: there was a time, nearly 30 years ago, when jets were seen for the first time at an hadronic collider (and presented in Paris!). Those were days when a physicist could get excited for a a di-jet event with a 140 GeV invariant mass, produced in hadronic collisions at a center of mass energy of 540 GeV. Today the hype is about di-jet events of 2 TeV invariant mass: it seems to me that such a comparison helps to put things into a humbling perspective, reminding us how much road has been done, how mush is still to do, and that we are all standing on the sholders of giants.
Both ATLAS and CSM had impressive first cross section measurements for single jets and di-jet objects, already binned in different rapidity regions, and up to unprecedented di-jet masses. And the agreement with the NLO QCD theory calculation is already impressive, despite the data uncertainties are not yet the best possible!
In this particular respect, I was not completely satisfied of the way the CMS explained their approach to get the 5-10% jet energy scale they claim. They certainly have several ratio measurements that reduce the impact of the systematic uncertainty on this quantity, but I'm anyway still curious! And since the data uncertainty is still the dominant one for the cross section measurement of both experiments, and it's mainly driven by jet energy scale, it's a point that will become very relevant as soon at the statistics will be large enough to make precise measurements in previously unexplored $p_T$ and $m_{1,2}$ ranges. This moment is certainly not far in time!
Of course pQCD is a nasty beast, and as soon as one starts to compare his jet results with some tune of his preferred MonteCarlo, he can be assured that someone will ask how much the chosen tunes are reliable, how well they fits with the low energy data from previous experiments, how well he know the MC authors... :-) I suspect a human component in this aggressive questioning: like it or not, jets are really the only domain in which the LHC experiments have already overtaken the Tevatron analyzes in mass reach. Thing that both the speakers did not fail to remind to the audience, and that might have not pleased everyone!
For instance, I was eager to attend the session on Perturbative QCD, Jets and Diffractive Physics: partly because some of the results I have been working on in the last months were presented there, partly because I wanted to know how CMS was doing on the same subject, but mainly because I wanted to know how the LHC experiments are doing on the jet measurements. Jets are in fact copiously produced in the 7 TeV LHC collisions, and even with the not huge amount of data we have collected up to not, ATLAS and CMS are in fact already capable to make nice measurements, and, in a sense, already unique ones.
I was not disappointed: Tancredi, that was presenting the jet measurements for ATLAS, opened his talk with a nice historical reminders: there was a time, nearly 30 years ago, when jets were seen for the first time at an hadronic collider (and presented in Paris!). Those were days when a physicist could get excited for a a di-jet event with a 140 GeV invariant mass, produced in hadronic collisions at a center of mass energy of 540 GeV. Today the hype is about di-jet events of 2 TeV invariant mass: it seems to me that such a comparison helps to put things into a humbling perspective, reminding us how much road has been done, how mush is still to do, and that we are all standing on the sholders of giants.
Both ATLAS and CSM had impressive first cross section measurements for single jets and di-jet objects, already binned in different rapidity regions, and up to unprecedented di-jet masses. And the agreement with the NLO QCD theory calculation is already impressive, despite the data uncertainties are not yet the best possible!
In this particular respect, I was not completely satisfied of the way the CMS explained their approach to get the 5-10% jet energy scale they claim. They certainly have several ratio measurements that reduce the impact of the systematic uncertainty on this quantity, but I'm anyway still curious! And since the data uncertainty is still the dominant one for the cross section measurement of both experiments, and it's mainly driven by jet energy scale, it's a point that will become very relevant as soon at the statistics will be large enough to make precise measurements in previously unexplored $p_T$ and $m_{1,2}$ ranges. This moment is certainly not far in time!Of course pQCD is a nasty beast, and as soon as one starts to compare his jet results with some tune of his preferred MonteCarlo, he can be assured that someone will ask how much the chosen tunes are reliable, how well they fits with the low energy data from previous experiments, how well he know the MC authors... :-) I suspect a human component in this aggressive questioning: like it or not, jets are really the only domain in which the LHC experiments have already overtaken the Tevatron analyzes in mass reach. Thing that both the speakers did not fail to remind to the audience, and that might have not pleased everyone!
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Day 2: Higgs at Tevatron, Higgs at LHC, Higgs on the BBC
Friday afternoon I sat again in a relatively packed room for the Higgs session. The effect of the rumor seems to fade away, but there is still quite a buzz around the Tevatron Higgs searches, especially because our friends are professionally distilling their results at a tantalizing pace, and - in case you missed that - the final Tevatron combination will be shown only on Monday :-)
Every Higgs search channel at Tevatron in has its peculiarities and its reasons of interest (since I'm working on the $H\to\gamma\gamma$ search at LHC myself, I was for instance particularly interested by this presentation), but what that I always find impressive in these session are not the single analyzes, but the combination of them.
What is rather clear in fact is that neither CDF nor D0 have enough sensitivity and data to see the Higgs (or claim it does not exist) in a single decay channel. Take for instance the $\gamma\gamma$ channel I was mentioning before: with this channel only both the Tevatron experiments can today only place a limit on the Standard Model Higgs boson production around 20 times the SM cross section.
On the other hand, this channel can add about 5% sensitivity to the combined SM Higgs combinations, and plays an especially important role in the mass region around 130 GeV. Similarly, dozens of other channels can bring their small but important contribution to the global sensitivity. Have a look for instance at the list of Higgs searches that are combined by D0:
or at the impressive combination of the CDF limits for all the channels they are looking at:
Putting all these searches together is an industrial work, with a non negligible effort of standardization of the results format, both by the different analysis teams in a collaboration and by the two collaborations. It's something ATLAS and CMS have to learn to do quickly: as it came out during the session, there already exists a combined ATLAS-CMS effort for the statistical combination of their results, and very recently a first exercise of LHC Higgs results combination was performed, but the road to reach the current Tevatron expertise and organization is still rather long.
But - don't you know? - the Tevatron combination will only be presented on Monday, so let's still stick to the separated D0 and CDF ones. As you can see for the previous plot, CDF was lucky and was able to reach sensitivity to the SM at 165 GeV alone. D0 was slightly less lucky, but is nearly there too: congratulations!
The most interesting questions to the Tevatron experiments during the session were all rotating around the same subject: how much more data wold they need to bring their curves below 1 along all the mass range? It's certainly a very relevant question: as you can see form the the ATLAS and CMS talks at the same session, the LHC experiments will need time since we can reach similar sensitivities, and in the meanwhile the Tevatron would certainly like to keep on taking data as long as possible. This is such a hot subject these days that it has percolated to the media, as the D0 speaker reminded us:
It's certainly not easy to answer: how much would the CDF and D0 sensitivity curves would move toward 1 with twice the luminosity they have today? And with three times? Taking into account that to improve the sensitivity by a factor $N$ one needs $N^2$ the luminosity, they certainly still need quite a lot of additional data. And even if they claim they can improve the analyzes further more, and maybe include some other remote channel they might still miss in the combination, statistics will still play the dominant role. But if I were them, I would certainly try to keep on running anyway as long as I can.
Every Higgs search channel at Tevatron in has its peculiarities and its reasons of interest (since I'm working on the $H\to\gamma\gamma$ search at LHC myself, I was for instance particularly interested by this presentation), but what that I always find impressive in these session are not the single analyzes, but the combination of them.
What is rather clear in fact is that neither CDF nor D0 have enough sensitivity and data to see the Higgs (or claim it does not exist) in a single decay channel. Take for instance the $\gamma\gamma$ channel I was mentioning before: with this channel only both the Tevatron experiments can today only place a limit on the Standard Model Higgs boson production around 20 times the SM cross section.
On the other hand, this channel can add about 5% sensitivity to the combined SM Higgs combinations, and plays an especially important role in the mass region around 130 GeV. Similarly, dozens of other channels can bring their small but important contribution to the global sensitivity. Have a look for instance at the list of Higgs searches that are combined by D0:
or at the impressive combination of the CDF limits for all the channels they are looking at:
Putting all these searches together is an industrial work, with a non negligible effort of standardization of the results format, both by the different analysis teams in a collaboration and by the two collaborations. It's something ATLAS and CMS have to learn to do quickly: as it came out during the session, there already exists a combined ATLAS-CMS effort for the statistical combination of their results, and very recently a first exercise of LHC Higgs results combination was performed, but the road to reach the current Tevatron expertise and organization is still rather long.But - don't you know? - the Tevatron combination will only be presented on Monday, so let's still stick to the separated D0 and CDF ones. As you can see for the previous plot, CDF was lucky and was able to reach sensitivity to the SM at 165 GeV alone. D0 was slightly less lucky, but is nearly there too: congratulations!
The most interesting questions to the Tevatron experiments during the session were all rotating around the same subject: how much more data wold they need to bring their curves below 1 along all the mass range? It's certainly a very relevant question: as you can see form the the ATLAS and CMS talks at the same session, the LHC experiments will need time since we can reach similar sensitivities, and in the meanwhile the Tevatron would certainly like to keep on taking data as long as possible. This is such a hot subject these days that it has percolated to the media, as the D0 speaker reminded us:
It's certainly not easy to answer: how much would the CDF and D0 sensitivity curves would move toward 1 with twice the luminosity they have today? And with three times? Taking into account that to improve the sensitivity by a factor $N$ one needs $N^2$ the luminosity, they certainly still need quite a lot of additional data. And even if they claim they can improve the analyzes further more, and maybe include some other remote channel they might still miss in the combination, statistics will still play the dominant role. But if I were them, I would certainly try to keep on running anyway as long as I can.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Day 1: ATLAS and CMS electrons and photons, and some Tevatron Higgs searches
I mostly kept my program.
Mostly, because I arrived slightly late at the Palais des Congres for the afternoon session (the French waitress at the creperie just in front of the Saint Paul church was so slow...): Salle 252B was already so packed I was not able to enter, and I decided to head directly to Salle Maillot for the LHC-calorimetry-electron-and-photon session. Pity, I missed Erik Verlinde's talk. Someone told me during the reception that apparently his presentation was followed by quite a discussion: is there any theorist out there that attended the session and wants to report?
ATLAS and CMS calorimetry, electrons and photons
In a nutshell: both the ATLAS and CMS electromagnetic calorimeters are doing rather well, thanks for asking :-) More seriously: both the experiments seem to have successfully used a fair amount of integrated luminosity at 7 TeV to commission their electron and photon triggers, reconstruction algorithms and selection procedures. And, even if probably neither of them would ever put it in this way, both the experiments still sees some small discrepancy between data and MonteCarlo in some of the variable used for the particle identification. I would dare to say that the main difference between the two is in the way the ATLAS and CMS speakers decided to address this point. The discriminating variable used to select electrons and photons don't exactly look the same in data and MC? When asked, the ATLAS speaker simply acknowledged the mismatches, and minimized saying that there's still some "work in progress" needed to understand and solve the issues. With similar material, the CMS speaker simply flashed through the plots claiming fair-to-reasonable-to-excellent agreement for all of them. By looking in more details the graphs at the end of the session (and peering to some of the posters related to the same subject), I must admit that - despite the impression someone could have had at the end of the session - I have some hard time to conclude that one experiment is doing better that the other. I'm tempted to say that the only real difference - but I'm of course exaggerating and kidding - is their public relation strategy :-) In the next days we'll see more physics-oriented results related to electrons and photons: I'm curious to see if things will get more explicitly different.
P.S. the ATLAS $J/\psi$ peak obtained using the tracks' $p_T$ is finally taking advantage of the bremsstrahlung recovery fit that was missing at pLHC, and a fair comparison with CMS can now be done.
Low and high mass Higgs searches at Tevatron
After the coffee break and the talk on Material mapping in ATLAS, I tried to enter again Salle 252B for the first Higgs at Tevatron session. Not an easy task: probably thanks to the rumor spread in last weeks, everyone was eager to see if there was really something to get excited about. Just to give you an idea, I finally managed to enter, but I had to sit on the floor for most of the session...
Not all of the searches at low Higgs mass were presented today, and the speakers were so kind to remind us at every single talk - in a perfectly orchestrated PR action - that the CDF combination and D0 combination will only be presented tomorrow, while for the full Tevatron combination we will have to wait until Monday at the plenary talk. I leave to you to browse the plots on the transparency, and eventually to try to do a combination by eye. I would probably bet on and larger exclusion region at high mass (easy). Someone braver - with a bit of imagination and a leap of faith - may imagine some kind of excess at low mass (but this is fiction, and I'm not good at it).
Three lines on the reception
Imagine 1088 hungry physicist packed in a small hall at the end of a long first day. Results: the waiters could not even go from the kitchen to the central bouvette with their finger-food trays, they got systematically intercepted along the way, and the trays emptied by a storm of locusts!
Mostly, because I arrived slightly late at the Palais des Congres for the afternoon session (the French waitress at the creperie just in front of the Saint Paul church was so slow...): Salle 252B was already so packed I was not able to enter, and I decided to head directly to Salle Maillot for the LHC-calorimetry-electron-and-photon session. Pity, I missed Erik Verlinde's talk. Someone told me during the reception that apparently his presentation was followed by quite a discussion: is there any theorist out there that attended the session and wants to report?
ATLAS and CMS calorimetry, electrons and photons
In a nutshell: both the ATLAS and CMS electromagnetic calorimeters are doing rather well, thanks for asking :-) More seriously: both the experiments seem to have successfully used a fair amount of integrated luminosity at 7 TeV to commission their electron and photon triggers, reconstruction algorithms and selection procedures. And, even if probably neither of them would ever put it in this way, both the experiments still sees some small discrepancy between data and MonteCarlo in some of the variable used for the particle identification. I would dare to say that the main difference between the two is in the way the ATLAS and CMS speakers decided to address this point. The discriminating variable used to select electrons and photons don't exactly look the same in data and MC? When asked, the ATLAS speaker simply acknowledged the mismatches, and minimized saying that there's still some "work in progress" needed to understand and solve the issues. With similar material, the CMS speaker simply flashed through the plots claiming fair-to-reasonable-to-excellent agreement for all of them. By looking in more details the graphs at the end of the session (and peering to some of the posters related to the same subject), I must admit that - despite the impression someone could have had at the end of the session - I have some hard time to conclude that one experiment is doing better that the other. I'm tempted to say that the only real difference - but I'm of course exaggerating and kidding - is their public relation strategy :-) In the next days we'll see more physics-oriented results related to electrons and photons: I'm curious to see if things will get more explicitly different.
P.S. the ATLAS $J/\psi$ peak obtained using the tracks' $p_T$ is finally taking advantage of the bremsstrahlung recovery fit that was missing at pLHC, and a fair comparison with CMS can now be done.
Low and high mass Higgs searches at TevatronAfter the coffee break and the talk on Material mapping in ATLAS, I tried to enter again Salle 252B for the first Higgs at Tevatron session. Not an easy task: probably thanks to the rumor spread in last weeks, everyone was eager to see if there was really something to get excited about. Just to give you an idea, I finally managed to enter, but I had to sit on the floor for most of the session...
Not all of the searches at low Higgs mass were presented today, and the speakers were so kind to remind us at every single talk - in a perfectly orchestrated PR action - that the CDF combination and D0 combination will only be presented tomorrow, while for the full Tevatron combination we will have to wait until Monday at the plenary talk. I leave to you to browse the plots on the transparency, and eventually to try to do a combination by eye. I would probably bet on and larger exclusion region at high mass (easy). Someone braver - with a bit of imagination and a leap of faith - may imagine some kind of excess at low mass (but this is fiction, and I'm not good at it).
Three lines on the reception
Imagine 1088 hungry physicist packed in a small hall at the end of a long first day. Results: the waiters could not even go from the kitchen to the central bouvette with their finger-food trays, they got systematically intercepted along the way, and the trays emptied by a storm of locusts!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Luminosity is not the whole story
One month and a half ago I was playing the fortune-teller, and trying to guess what ATLAS and CMS will be showing at ICHEP as a function of the integrated luminosity they would have collected. ICHEP will start in a few days: today in principle we should be able to revisit that list, and to make more-than-educated guesses on the LHC results we will see in Paris.
Let's start with the luminosity. How much of it have been delivered by the LHC and secured by the experiments? The answer to the first part of the question is on the LHC Programme Coordination web pages, from which I took this plot:
As of today, the machine gave us more than 250 nb-1: not bad at all. But if the the LHC delivers luminosity, the experiments have to record it, and the data taking is not necessarily 100% efficient: the detectors might not be ready when the "stable beam" flag is declared, or some of their parts can malfunction during the run, maybe even forcing to stop and restart the data recording.
In this respect, the experiments did rather well: as you can appreciate from the plot above, the ATLAS data taking was globally around 94% efficient since the end of March. Again, not bad at all! I was not able to find a similar public plot for CMS, so I will naively assume a similar efficiency (anybody from CMS out there, that can point me to a public results?), or even a better one. We are then left with slightly less than 250 nb-1: according to the list, we could then safely bet on a W and Z evidence (and possibly on a bold first cross section measurement, at least for the W), on measurements of prompt electrons, photons and maybe muons, and on a lot of jet-related items.
But luminosity is not the whole story. In order to be shown at conferences, data have to be properly understood (and this take time), and results have to be approved (and this can take even more time, as Gordon recently reminded us). For instance, a good part of the ATLAS result-approval procedure for ICHEP took place during the last ATLAS week in Copenaghen, nearly three weeks ago! Look again at the luminosity plot, and see where we stood then: the LHC decided to increase the number of protons per bunch and the number of bunches immediately after!
Ok, none of us would be so lazy not to (at least try to) update the results with 10 times or more the data. But more data means more precise results, and funnily enough more precise results means more things to be understood. The point is those discrepancies that were hiding under the statistical fluctuations a month ago are now clearly rising their head to say "Hello! Try to guess what I am and what I mean...". As usual, things are often more complicated that they seem at the beginning.
These days both ATLAS and CMS are hectically reviewing the last-minute results exploiting the largest data samples possible, and I know there will still be approval meetings on both sides next Tuesday and Wednesday (ICHEP begins next Thursday!). I am really looking forward to see what we will get!
Let's start with the luminosity. How much of it have been delivered by the LHC and secured by the experiments? The answer to the first part of the question is on the LHC Programme Coordination web pages, from which I took this plot:
As of today, the machine gave us more than 250 nb-1: not bad at all. But if the the LHC delivers luminosity, the experiments have to record it, and the data taking is not necessarily 100% efficient: the detectors might not be ready when the "stable beam" flag is declared, or some of their parts can malfunction during the run, maybe even forcing to stop and restart the data recording.
In this respect, the experiments did rather well: as you can appreciate from the plot above, the ATLAS data taking was globally around 94% efficient since the end of March. Again, not bad at all! I was not able to find a similar public plot for CMS, so I will naively assume a similar efficiency (anybody from CMS out there, that can point me to a public results?), or even a better one. We are then left with slightly less than 250 nb-1: according to the list, we could then safely bet on a W and Z evidence (and possibly on a bold first cross section measurement, at least for the W), on measurements of prompt electrons, photons and maybe muons, and on a lot of jet-related items.But luminosity is not the whole story. In order to be shown at conferences, data have to be properly understood (and this take time), and results have to be approved (and this can take even more time, as Gordon recently reminded us). For instance, a good part of the ATLAS result-approval procedure for ICHEP took place during the last ATLAS week in Copenaghen, nearly three weeks ago! Look again at the luminosity plot, and see where we stood then: the LHC decided to increase the number of protons per bunch and the number of bunches immediately after!
Ok, none of us would be so lazy not to (at least try to) update the results with 10 times or more the data. But more data means more precise results, and funnily enough more precise results means more things to be understood. The point is those discrepancies that were hiding under the statistical fluctuations a month ago are now clearly rising their head to say "Hello! Try to guess what I am and what I mean...". As usual, things are often more complicated that they seem at the beginning.
These days both ATLAS and CMS are hectically reviewing the last-minute results exploiting the largest data samples possible, and I know there will still be approval meetings on both sides next Tuesday and Wednesday (ICHEP begins next Thursday!). I am really looking forward to see what we will get!
Thursday, July 15, 2010
How do you know ICHEP's just around the corner?
Two ways you know that ICHEP is imminent:
With the size of today's particle physics collaborations - peaking at more than 3,000 people each for the ATLAS and CMS collaborations - getting a result approved for presentation at a major conference like ICHEP is no simple task. With so many people involved, the collaborations put in place rules and procedures governing approval processes for results and publications, with the goal of ensuring that all results have passed rigorous review and that every collaboration member has the opportunity to review and comment on every result. For the LHC experiments, the rules that have been painstakingly assembled over a decade or more have been getting their first real workout this summer, first for the PLHC conference in Hamburg, and now for ICHEP.
To give you an idea of the work behind each plot presented in an LHC talk at ICHEP, here's a quick overview of the steps involved (symmetry Magazine has a more in-depth look at this data-to-discovery process).
A small group of a few to a few dozen physicists spends weeks, months, or years analyzing data and preparing a result. Depending on the nature of the result, it may or may not be combined with result(s) from other group(s) within the same collaboration. It's then unveiled to the entire collaboration for review, and after a certain period where any collaboration member can comment (remember: 3,000 people!), receives final approval for presentation in public. Or not, in which case the process starts all over again.
And that's all just the first step. Once the result is approved, be it in the form of a plot, chart or paper for publication, then the work begins for the people who have been selected to present it and other results in public at a conference like ICHEP. They select from the approved results, prepare their poster or PowerPoint, go through a similar approval process, and practice in front of their colleagues in the collaboration.
And in cases like the current Higgs limits from the Tevatron, results could be combined from two different experiments, which doubles the complexity of the entire process. It's no wonder that, around the time of major conferences, sleep is a rare commodity.
(But even with ICHEP just around the corner, I bet some of those same hard-working scientists will take a few hours off to attend CERN's annual music extravaganza, the Hardronic Festival.)
I'll end with a quick introduction, since I'm the new girl on the blog - I'm a nuclear physicist turned science communicator, working for Fermilab Office of Communication but based at CERN for the past three years. I spend most of my time telling the story of the LHC project and U.S. scientists' involvement to journalists and the public, and the rest of my time trying to keep up with developments in the larger world of particle physics. So I can't wait to see and hear what's presented at ICHEP, and to write about it here and at the other blog I contribute to, symmetry breaking.
- The blogosphere, Twitterverse and science media are abuzz with rumors regarding possible new results;
- The families of particle physicists worldwide bemoan the temporary disappearance of their loved ones.
With the size of today's particle physics collaborations - peaking at more than 3,000 people each for the ATLAS and CMS collaborations - getting a result approved for presentation at a major conference like ICHEP is no simple task. With so many people involved, the collaborations put in place rules and procedures governing approval processes for results and publications, with the goal of ensuring that all results have passed rigorous review and that every collaboration member has the opportunity to review and comment on every result. For the LHC experiments, the rules that have been painstakingly assembled over a decade or more have been getting their first real workout this summer, first for the PLHC conference in Hamburg, and now for ICHEP.
To give you an idea of the work behind each plot presented in an LHC talk at ICHEP, here's a quick overview of the steps involved (symmetry Magazine has a more in-depth look at this data-to-discovery process).
A small group of a few to a few dozen physicists spends weeks, months, or years analyzing data and preparing a result. Depending on the nature of the result, it may or may not be combined with result(s) from other group(s) within the same collaboration. It's then unveiled to the entire collaboration for review, and after a certain period where any collaboration member can comment (remember: 3,000 people!), receives final approval for presentation in public. Or not, in which case the process starts all over again.
And that's all just the first step. Once the result is approved, be it in the form of a plot, chart or paper for publication, then the work begins for the people who have been selected to present it and other results in public at a conference like ICHEP. They select from the approved results, prepare their poster or PowerPoint, go through a similar approval process, and practice in front of their colleagues in the collaboration.
And in cases like the current Higgs limits from the Tevatron, results could be combined from two different experiments, which doubles the complexity of the entire process. It's no wonder that, around the time of major conferences, sleep is a rare commodity.
(But even with ICHEP just around the corner, I bet some of those same hard-working scientists will take a few hours off to attend CERN's annual music extravaganza, the Hardronic Festival.)
I'll end with a quick introduction, since I'm the new girl on the blog - I'm a nuclear physicist turned science communicator, working for Fermilab Office of Communication but based at CERN for the past three years. I spend most of my time telling the story of the LHC project and U.S. scientists' involvement to journalists and the public, and the rest of my time trying to keep up with developments in the larger world of particle physics. So I can't wait to see and hear what's presented at ICHEP, and to write about it here and at the other blog I contribute to, symmetry breaking.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
What should we expect from LHC?
June is coming, summer conferences are approaching, LHC physicists are feverishly working to produce results to show.
In the next few months there will be three main conferences where physics results from the LHC experiments will be presented: the nearest one is Physics At LHC, that will take place at Desy in Germany the second week of June; the second one is, erm... you know... ICHEP; the third one is the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium in Toronto, at the end of August. The kind of results one might expect to be presented at each of these conferences is rather different. The LHC is in fact steadily delivering proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV: the farther in time the conference, the more integrated luminosity the experiments will be able to use for their analyzes.
Could we try to guess what is likely to be shown at ICHEP by ATLAS and CMS? Well, it's definitively not an easy prediction: even assuming a perfect efficiency of the two experiments in collecting the data and analyzing it, the LHC beam conditions are improving every day, and the exploitable integrated luminosity at - let's say - mid July can largely vary.
Let's then try first a different exercise: which results are more likely to be seen at a conference as a function of the integrated luminosity collected at 7 TeV, from the small amount we already know as been secured by the experiments to the 1 fb-1 promised by the machine for the end of the 2010-2011 running? Warning: what follows is a very approximate list, I might have missed important signals here and there, and my judgment is certainly biased by my ATLAS experience. Here's what we'll get (or what we already got):
In the next few months there will be three main conferences where physics results from the LHC experiments will be presented: the nearest one is Physics At LHC, that will take place at Desy in Germany the second week of June; the second one is, erm... you know... ICHEP; the third one is the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium in Toronto, at the end of August. The kind of results one might expect to be presented at each of these conferences is rather different. The LHC is in fact steadily delivering proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV: the farther in time the conference, the more integrated luminosity the experiments will be able to use for their analyzes.
Could we try to guess what is likely to be shown at ICHEP by ATLAS and CMS? Well, it's definitively not an easy prediction: even assuming a perfect efficiency of the two experiments in collecting the data and analyzing it, the LHC beam conditions are improving every day, and the exploitable integrated luminosity at - let's say - mid July can largely vary.
Let's then try first a different exercise: which results are more likely to be seen at a conference as a function of the integrated luminosity collected at 7 TeV, from the small amount we already know as been secured by the experiments to the 1 fb-1 promised by the machine for the end of the 2010-2011 running? Warning: what follows is a very approximate list, I might have missed important signals here and there, and my judgment is certainly biased by my ATLAS experience. Here's what we'll get (or what we already got):
- 10-100 μb-1: millions of charged pions to happily redo the charged multiplicity analysis published with the 900 GeV data collected in 2009; a few tens of $J/\psi \to \mu \mu$, a few jets here and there. Any resonance that can be spot using the tracker system (like K's and $\Lambda$'s) has been been seen at this point; signal from $\pi^0$ and $\eta$ decaying in photons pairs is found and well isolated.
- 100-1000 μb-1: any hint of a $J/\psi \to \mu \mu$ peak should now be clearly visible;
- 1-10 nb-1: more jets. And of course more jets-related measurements.
- 10-100 nb-1: a few tens of W begins to appears in the data. The lucky ones might have seen a few Z bosons. A first observation of prompt inclusive electrons should be at reach at this point.
- 100-1000 nb-1: more and more jets. The first inclusive muon measurements should be feasible. Signal from prompt photons should have been isolated.
- 1-10 pb-1: at this point ATLAS and CMS should have secured enough W and Z to dare to attempt a first cross-section measurement. They might be able to pretend to have seen the top quark.
- 10-100 pb-1: first B-physics related measurements. Something could already be said about some exotic scenarios, and some SUSY points.
- 100-1000 pb-1: at this point, one could even optimistically hope in some timid news about the Higgs boson (exclusion), at least where the sensitivity is higher.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
And CMS, in the meantime...
The blogosphere is abuzz with the recent news of a startling new result by DZERO -see the previous post by Jester on this issue by scrolling down- but in the meantime at CERN experimenters are quietly working at their first meaningful physics results, with proton-proton collisions at the highest energies so far achieved.
This morning, after months of work, finally a paper by the CMS collaboration sees the light. Or should I say the pre-light, since the paper has been sent to the Cornell Arxiv, and to Physical Review Letters, but it is so far only a pre-print: the PRL reviewers will need to approve it for publication. Given the excruciatingly long and painful internal review process that the paper has withstood within CMS, by about 5000 eyes (or 2500 pairs if you prefer), I would say there is not a chance that the paper does not pass the standards of PRL now. But maybe it is better to be cautious, so - pre-light!
The paper reports on a measurement of Bose-Einstein correlations between pairs of charged pions recorded by CMS in its early runs at 0.9 and 2.36 TeV of center-of-mass energy. Nothing too exciting, but indeed a nice clean new measurement from data which allows little else at this stage, due to the small luminosity collected by the LHC this far.
I was personally involved in the analysis of the data for this result, so I quite well know how painful it was to produce the paper. But it has left today, so it is time to cheer up. In the meantime, CMS is working at dozens of other publications, which are expected in time for ICHEP. Paris will be brimming with new LHC results, I am sure. Another reason to look forward to it, besides the ephemeral albeit exciting news from the DZERO detector!
This morning, after months of work, finally a paper by the CMS collaboration sees the light. Or should I say the pre-light, since the paper has been sent to the Cornell Arxiv, and to Physical Review Letters, but it is so far only a pre-print: the PRL reviewers will need to approve it for publication. Given the excruciatingly long and painful internal review process that the paper has withstood within CMS, by about 5000 eyes (or 2500 pairs if you prefer), I would say there is not a chance that the paper does not pass the standards of PRL now. But maybe it is better to be cautious, so - pre-light!
The paper reports on a measurement of Bose-Einstein correlations between pairs of charged pions recorded by CMS in its early runs at 0.9 and 2.36 TeV of center-of-mass energy. Nothing too exciting, but indeed a nice clean new measurement from data which allows little else at this stage, due to the small luminosity collected by the LHC this far.
I was personally involved in the analysis of the data for this result, so I quite well know how painful it was to produce the paper. But it has left today, so it is time to cheer up. In the meantime, CMS is working at dozens of other publications, which are expected in time for ICHEP. Paris will be brimming with new LHC results, I am sure. Another reason to look forward to it, besides the ephemeral albeit exciting news from the DZERO detector!
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