Title: Accelerating Science with Deep Learning

Speaker:  Michela Paginini (Yale)

Abstract: With a rate of approximately 1 billion proton-proton collisions per second at an energy of 13 TeV, data sets from high energy physics collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are ideal for the application of machine learning. As new particles are created and detected, they produce high-dimensional, multi-modal streams of information that can be cast as sequential, image-based, causal learning tasks. In this talk, I will explore applications of computer vision techniques to improve generative and discriminative capabilities at the LHC. Specifically, I will outline the methodologies in a recent contribution where we introduced a deep generative model to enable high-fidelity, fast, detector simulation and achieved preliminary speed-up factors of up to 100,000x. Although there are still open challenges, this work represents a significant stepping stone toward a full neural network-based simulator that could save significant computing time and enable many analyses at the LHC and beyond. I will conclude with applications of deep learning to analysis scenarios and ideas for future machine learning powered solutions in high energy physics.

Title: Latest Top-Higgs Coupling Results from ATLAS

Speaker: Peter Onyisi (UT Austin)

Abstract: The Yukawa coupling of the Higgs boson to the top quark is one of the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model, and its size probes whether the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism and the fermion mass generation mechanism are the same.  Indirect measurements of this quantity – determined from Higgs production via top quark loops – are available, but suffer from ambiguity with possible new physics in the loop diagrams.  In contrast we can constrain the Yukawa coupling with tree diagrams using the cross-section of associated production of the Higgs boson with a top quark pair (ttH).  I will discuss the latest ATLAS seaches for ttH production in the H -> gamma gamma and H -> bb decays and some projections for the future.

Date: Friday September 6, 2013 at 11am

Location: 223 Herman Brown Hall, Rice University

Title: Search for the Higgs boson decaying to four leptons in the ATLAS detector at LHC.

Speaker: Meng Xiao (IRFU, CAE Saclay)

Abstract: I will introduce my work on the Higgs to four lepton analysis, covering the three aspects: background estimation for 2011 and 2012 analysis, the impact of FSR on the Higgs mass, and a method to calculate per-event mass uncertainty.

Host: Paul Padley