- WAVE: Machine Learning for Full-Waveform Time-Of-Flight Detectors We propose a WAveform Vector Exploitation (WAVE) deep neural network for full-waveform Time-Of-Flight (TOF) physics detectors, and evaluate its performance against traditional reconstruction techniques via Monte Carlo study of a small plastic-scintillator scatter camera. Ultralytics LLC (www.ultralytics.com) provides WAVE freely under the open source GPL-3.0 license at https://github.com/ultralytics/wave. 4 authors · Nov 14, 2018
- Lake- and Surface-Based Detectors for Forward Neutrino Physics We propose two medium-baseline, kiloton-scale neutrino experiments to study neutrinos from LHC proton-proton collisions: SINE, a surface-based scintillator panel detector observing muon neutrinos from the CMS interaction point, and UNDINE, a water Cherenkov detector submerged in lake Geneva observing all-flavor neutrinos from LHCb. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we estimate millions of neutrino interactions during the high-luminosity LHC era. We show that these datasets can constrain neutrino cross sections, charm production in pp collisions, and strangeness enhancement as a solution to the cosmic-ray muon puzzle. SINE and UNDINE thus offer a cost-effective medium-baseline complement to the proposed short-baseline forward physics facility. 5 authors · Jan 14, 2025
- PILArNet: Public Dataset for Particle Imaging Liquid Argon Detectors in High Energy Physics Rapid advancement of machine learning solutions has often coincided with the production of a test public data set. Such datasets reduce the largest barrier to entry for tackling a problem -- procuring data -- while also providing a benchmark to compare different solutions. Furthermore, large datasets have been used to train high-performing feature finders which are then used in new approaches to problems beyond that initially defined. In order to encourage the rapid development in the analysis of data collected using liquid argon time projection chambers, a class of particle detectors used in high energy physics experiments, we have produced the PILArNet, first 2D and 3D open dataset to be used for a couple of key analysis tasks. The initial dataset presented in this paper contains 300,000 samples simulated and recorded in three different volume sizes. The dataset is stored efficiently in sparse 2D and 3D matrix format with auxiliary information about simulated particles in the volume, and is made available for public research use. In this paper we describe the dataset, tasks, and the method used to procure the sample. 3 authors · Jun 2, 2020
- Likelihood Reconstruction for Radio Detectors of Neutrinos and Cosmic Rays Ultra-high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays are excellent probes of astroparticle physics phenomena. For astroparticle physics analyses, robust and accurate reconstruction of signal parameters such as arrival direction and energy is essential. Radio detection is an established detector concept explored by many observatories; however, current reconstruction methods ignore bin-to-bin noise correlations, which limits reconstruction resolution and, so far, has prevented calculations of event-by-event uncertainties. In this work, we present a likelihood description of neutrino or cosmic-ray signals in radio detectors with correlated noise, as present in all neutrino and cosmic-ray radio detectors. We demonstrate, with simulation studies of both neutrinos and cosmic-ray radio signals, that signal parameters such as energy and direction, including event-by-event uncertainties with correct coverage, can be obtained. This method reduces reconstruction uncertainties and biases compared to previous approaches. Additionally, the Likelihood can be used for event selection and enables differentiable end-to-end detector optimization. The reconstruction code is available through the open-source software NuRadioReco. 5 authors · Oct 24, 2025
- Numerical modeling of SNSPD absorption utilizing optical conductivity with quantum corrections Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors are widely used in various fields of physics and technology, due to their high efficiency and timing precision. Although, in principle, their detection mechanism offers broadband operation, their wavelength range has to be optimized by the optical cavity parameters for a specific task. We present a study of the optical absorption of a superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) with an optical cavity. The optical properties of the niobium nitride films, measured by spectroscopic ellipsometry, were modelled using the Drude-Lorentz model with quantum corrections. The numerical simulations of the optical response of the detectors show that the wavelength range of the detector is not solely determined by its geometry, but the optical conductivity of the disordered thin metallic films contributes considerably. This contribution can be conveniently expressed by the ratio of imaginary and real parts of the optical conductivity. This knowledge can be utilized in detector design. 4 authors · Aug 1, 2024
- Detecting LHC Neutrinos at Surface Level The first direct detection of neutrinos at the LHC not only marks the beginning of a novel collider neutrino program at CERN but also motivates considering additional neutrino detectors to fully exploit the associated physics potential. We investigate the feasibility and physics potential of neutrino experiments located at the surface-level. A topographic desk study was performed to identify all points at which the LHC's neutrino beams exit the earth. The closest location lies about 9 km east of the CMS interaction point, at the bottom of Lake Geneva. Several detectors to be placed at this location are considered, including a water Cherenkov detector and an emulsion detector. The detector concepts are introduced, and projections for their contribution to the LHC forward neutrino program and searches for dark sector particles are presented. However, the dilution of the neutrino flux over distance reduces the neutrino yield significantly, limiting the physics potential of surface-level detectors compared to ones closer to the interaction point, including the proposed FPF. 8 authors · Jan 10, 2025
- Theoretical Antineutrino Detection, Direction and Ranging at Long Distances In this paper we introduce the concept of what we call "NUDAR" (NeUtrino Direction and Ranging), making the point that measurements of the observed energy and direction vectors can be employed to passively deduce the exact three-dimensional location and thermal power of geophysical and anthropogenic neutrino sources from even a single detector. We present the most precise background estimates to date, all handled in full three dimensions, as functions of depth and geographical location. For the present calculations, we consider a hypothetical 138 kiloton detector which can be transported to an ocean site and deployed to an operational depth. We present a Bayesian estimation framework to incorporate any a priori knowledge of the reactor that we are trying to detect, as well as the estimated uncertainty in the background and the oscillation parameters. Most importantly, we fully employ the knowledge of the reactor spectrum and the distance-dependent effects of neutrino oscillations on such spectra. The latter, in particular, makes possible determination of range from one location, given adequate signal statistics. Further, we explore the rich potential of improving detection with even modest improvements in individual neutrino direction determination. We conclude that a 300 MWth reactor can indeed be geolocated, and its operating power estimated with one or two detectors in the hundred kiloton class at ranges out to a few hundred kilometers. We note that such detectors would have natural and non-interfering utility for scientific studies of geo-neutrinos, neutrino oscillations, and astrophysical neutrinos. This motivates the development of cost effective methods of constructing and deploying such next generation detectors. 8 authors · Jul 9, 2013
- Fast kernel methods for Data Quality Monitoring as a goodness-of-fit test We here propose a machine learning approach for monitoring particle detectors in real-time. The goal is to assess the compatibility of incoming experimental data with a reference dataset, characterising the data behaviour under normal circumstances, via a likelihood-ratio hypothesis test. The model is based on a modern implementation of kernel methods, nonparametric algorithms that can learn any continuous function given enough data. The resulting approach is efficient and agnostic to the type of anomaly that may be present in the data. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of this strategy on multivariate data from drift tube chamber muon detectors. 8 authors · Mar 9, 2023
- A Language Model for Particle Tracking Particle tracking is crucial for almost all physics analysis programs at the Large Hadron Collider. Deep learning models are pervasively used in particle tracking related tasks. However, the current practice is to design and train one deep learning model for one task with supervised learning techniques. The trained models work well for tasks they are trained on but show no or little generalization capabilities. We propose to unify these models with a language model. In this paper, we present a tokenized detector representation that allows us to train a BERT model for particle tracking. The trained BERT model, namely TrackingBERT, offers latent detector module embedding that can be used for other tasks. This work represents the first step towards developing a foundational model for particle detector understanding. 7 authors · Feb 14, 2024
1 A new type of Neutrino Detector for Sterile Neutrino Search at Nuclear Reactors and Nuclear Nonproliferation Applications We describe a new detector, called NuLat, to study electron anti-neutrinos a few meters from a nuclear reactor, and search for anomalous neutrino oscillations. Such oscillations could be caused by sterile neutrinos, and might explain the "Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly". NuLat, is made possible by a natural synergy between the miniTimeCube and mini-LENS programs described in this paper. It features a "Raghavan Optical Lattice" (ROL) consisting of 3375 boron or ^6Li loaded plastic scintillator cubical cells 6.3\,cm (2.500") on a side. Cell boundaries have a 0.127\,mm (0.005") air gap, resulting in total internal reflection guiding most of the light down the 3 cardinal directions. The ROL detector technology for NuLat gives excellent spatial and energy resolution and allows for in-depth event topology studies. These features allow us to discern inverse beta decay (IBD) signals and the putative oscillation pattern, even in the presence of other backgrounds. We discuss here test venues, efficiency, sensitivity and project status. 24 authors · Jan 27, 2015
- A Review of NEST Models for Liquid Xenon and Exhaustive Comparison to Other Approaches This paper will discuss the microphysical simulation of interactions in liquid xenon, the active detector medium in many leading rare-event searches for new physics, and describe experimental observables useful for understanding detector performance. The scintillation and ionization yield distributions for signal and background will be presented using the Noble Element Simulation Technique (NEST), which is a toolkit based on experimental data and simple, empirical formulae, which mimic previous microphysics modeling, but are guided by data. The NEST models for light and charge production as a function of the particle type, energy, and electric field will be reviewed, as well as models for energy resolution and final pulse areas. NEST will be compared to other models or sets of models, and vetted against real data, with several specific examples pulled from XENON, ZEPLIN, LUX, LZ, PandaX, and table-top experiments used for calibrations. 26 authors · Nov 19, 2022
- Letter of Intent: The Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE) Neutron tagging in Gadolinium-doped water may play a significant role in reducing backgrounds from atmospheric neutrinos in next generation proton-decay searches using megaton-scale Water Cherenkov detectors. Similar techniques might also be useful in the detection of supernova neutrinos. Accurate determination of neutron tagging efficiencies will require a detailed understanding of the number of neutrons produced by neutrino interactions in water as a function of momentum transferred. We propose the Atmospheric Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE), designed to measure the neutron yield of atmospheric neutrino interactions in gadolinium-doped water. An innovative aspect of the ANNIE design is the use of precision timing to localize interaction vertices in the small fiducial volume of the detector. We propose to achieve this by using early production of LAPPDs (Large Area Picosecond Photodetectors). This experiment will be a first application of these devices demonstrating their feasibility for Water Cherenkov neutrino detectors. 33 authors · Apr 7, 2015
- Expression of Interest: The Atmospheric Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE) Neutron tagging in Gadolinium-doped water may play a significant role in reducing backgrounds from atmospheric neutrinos in next generation proton-decay searches using megaton-scale Water Cherenkov detectors. Similar techniques might also be useful in the detection of supernova neutrinos. Accurate determination of neutron tagging efficiencies will require a detailed understanding of the number of neutrons produced by neutrino interactions in water as a function of momentum transferred. We propose the Atmospheric Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE), designed to measure the neutron yield of atmospheric neutrino interactions in gadolinium-doped water. An innovative aspect of the ANNIE design is the use of precision timing to localize interaction vertices in the small fiducial volume of the detector. We propose to achieve this by using early production of LAPPDs (Large Area Picosecond Photodetectors). This experiment will be a first application of these devices demonstrating their feasibility for Water Cherenkov neutrino detectors. 25 authors · Feb 26, 2014
- AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015 Every second greater than 10^{25} antineutrinos radiate to space from Earth, shining like a faint antineutrino star. Underground antineutrino detectors have revealed the rapidly decaying fission products inside nuclear reactors, verified the long-lived radioactivity inside our planet, and informed sensitive experiments for probing fundamental physics. Mapping the anisotropic antineutrino flux and energy spectrum advance geoscience by defining the amount and distribution of radioactive power within Earth while critically evaluating competing compositional models of the planet. We present the Antineutrino Global Map 2015 (AGM2015), an experimentally informed model of Earth's surface antineutrino flux over the 0 to 11 MeV energy spectrum, along with an assessment of systematic errors. The open source AGM2015 provides fundamental predictions for experiments, assists in strategic detector placement to determine neutrino mass hierarchy, and aids in identifying undeclared nuclear reactors. We use cosmochemically and seismologically informed models of the radiogenic lithosphere/mantle combined with the estimated antineutrino flux, as measured by KamLAND and Borexino, to determine the Earth's total antineutrino luminosity at 3.4^{+2.3}_{-2.2} times 10^{25} nu_e. We find a dominant flux of geo-neutrinos, predict sub-equal crust and mantle contributions, with sim1% of the total flux from man-made nuclear reactors. 5 authors · Sep 13, 2015
- Panda: Self-distillation of Reusable Sensor-level Representations for High Energy Physics Liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs) provide dense, high-fidelity 3D measurements of particle interactions and underpin current and future neutrino and rare-event experiments. Physics reconstruction typically relies on complex detector-specific pipelines that use tens of hand-engineered pattern recognition algorithms or cascades of task-specific neural networks that require extensive, labeled simulation that requires a careful, time-consuming calibration process. We introduce Panda, a model that learns reusable sensor-level representations directly from raw unlabeled LArTPC data. Panda couples a hierarchical sparse 3D encoder with a multi-view, prototype-based self-distillation objective. On a simulated dataset, Panda substantially improves label efficiency and reconstruction quality, beating the previous state-of-the-art semantic segmentation model with 1,000times fewer labels. We also show that a single set-prediction head 1/20th the size of the backbone with no physical priors trained on frozen outputs from Panda can result in particle identification that is comparable with state-of-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction tools. Full fine-tuning further improves performance across all tasks. 2 authors · Dec 1, 2025
- mini-TimeCube as a Neutron Scatter Camera We present Monte Carlo (MC) simulation results from a study of a compact plastic-scintillator detector suitable for imaging fast neutrons in the 1 -- 10 MeV energy range: the miniTimeCube (mTC). Originally designed for antineutrino detection, the mTC consists of 24 MultiChannel Plate (MCP) photodetectors surrounding a 13 cm cube of boron-doped plastic scintillator. Our simulation results show that waveform digitization of 1536 optically sensitive channels surrounding the scintillator should allow for spatiotemporal determination of individual neutron-proton scatters in the detector volume to thicksim100 picoseconds and thicksim5 mm. A Bayesian estimation framework is presented for multiple-scatter reconstruction, and is used to estimate the incoming direction and energy of simulated individual neutrons. Finally, we show how populations of reconstructed neutrons can be used to estimate the direction and energy spectrum of nearby simulated neutron sources. 9 authors · Mar 5, 2019
- Fast Muon Tracking with Machine Learning Implemented in FPGA In this work, we present a new approach for fast tracking on multiwire proportional chambers with neural networks. The tracking networks are developed and adapted for the first-level trigger at hadron collider experiments. We use Monte Carlo samples generated by Geant4 with a custom muon chamber, which resembles part of the thin gap chambers from the ATLAS experiment, for training and performance evaluations. The chamber has a total of seven gas gaps, where the first and last gas gaps are displaced by ~1.5 m. Each gas gap has 50 channels with a size of 18-20 mm. Two neural network models are developed and presented: a convolutional neural network and a neural network optimized for the detector configuration of this study. In the latter network, a convolution layer is provided for each of three groups formed from 2-3 gas gaps of the chamber, and the outputs are fed into multilayer perceptrons in sequence. Both networks are transformed into hardware description language and implemented in Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA. The angular resolution is 2 mrad, which is comparable to the maximum resolution of the detector estimated by the minimum chi2 method. The latency achieved by the implemented firmware is less than 100 ns, and the throughput rate is 160 MHz. 5 authors · Feb 10, 2022
- Accurate and robust methods for direct background estimation in resonant anomaly detection Resonant anomaly detection methods have great potential for enhancing the sensitivity of traditional bump hunt searches. A key component of these methods is a high quality background template used to produce an anomaly score. Using the LHC Olympics R&D dataset, we demonstrate that this background template can also be repurposed to directly estimate the background expectation in a simple cut and count setup. In contrast to a traditional bump hunt, no fit to the invariant mass distribution is needed, thereby avoiding the potential problem of background sculpting. Furthermore, direct background estimation allows working with large background rejection rates, where resonant anomaly detection methods typically show their greatest improvement in significance. 7 authors · Oct 31, 2024
- Reconstruction of inclined extensive air showers using radio signals: from arrival times and amplitudes to direction and energy Radio detection is now an established technique for the study of ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays with energies above sim10^{17} eV. The next-generation of radio experiments aims to extend this technique to the observation of UHE earth-skimming neutrinos, which requires the detection of very inclined extensive air showers (EAS). In this article we present a new reconstruction method for the arrival direction and the energy of EAS. It combines a point-source-like description of the radio wavefront with a phenomenological model: the Angular Distribution Function (ADF). The ADF describes the angular distribution of the radio signal amplitude in the 50-200 MHz frequency range, with a particular focus on the Cherenkov angle, a crucial feature of the radio amplitude pattern. The method is applicable to showers with zenith angles larger than 60^circ, and in principle up to neutrino-induced showers with up-going trajectories. It is tested here on a simulated data set of EAS induced by cosmic rays. A resolution better than 4 arc-minutes (0.07^circ) is achieved on arrival direction, as well as an intrinsic resolution of 5% on the electromagnetic energy, and around 15% on the primary energy. 7 authors · Apr 25, 2025
1 A reconfigurable neural network ASIC for detector front-end data compression at the HL-LHC Despite advances in the programmable logic capabilities of modern trigger systems, a significant bottleneck remains in the amount of data to be transported from the detector to off-detector logic where trigger decisions are made. We demonstrate that a neural network autoencoder model can be implemented in a radiation tolerant ASIC to perform lossy data compression alleviating the data transmission problem while preserving critical information of the detector energy profile. For our application, we consider the high-granularity calorimeter from the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The advantage of the machine learning approach is in the flexibility and configurability of the algorithm. By changing the neural network weights, a unique data compression algorithm can be deployed for each sensor in different detector regions, and changing detector or collider conditions. To meet area, performance, and power constraints, we perform a quantization-aware training to create an optimized neural network hardware implementation. The design is achieved through the use of high-level synthesis tools and the hls4ml framework, and was processed through synthesis and physical layout flows based on a LP CMOS 65 nm technology node. The flow anticipates 200 Mrad of ionizing radiation to select gates, and reports a total area of 3.6 mm^2 and consumes 95 mW of power. The simulated energy consumption per inference is 2.4 nJ. This is the first radiation tolerant on-detector ASIC implementation of a neural network that has been designed for particle physics applications. 18 authors · May 4, 2021
- The Mu3e Experiment: Status and Short-Term Plans Mu3e is an experiment currently under construction at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, designed to search for the Lepton Flavor Violating (LFV) decay mu^+ rightarrow e^+e^-e^+. In extensions of the Standard Model (SM) that account for neutrino masses, this decay is theoretically allowed but occurs only through extremely rare loop processes, with a predicted branching ratio of approximately O(10^{-54}). Such a small probability implies that any observation of this decay would provide clear evidence for physics beyond the SM. The Mu3e experiment aims to probe the mu^+ rightarrow e^+e^-e^+ decay with a sensitivity of approximately O(10^{-15}) in its Phase-1 and plans to achieve a sensitivity of O(10^{-16}) after future upgrades. To reach its Phase-1 ambitious goals, Mu3e is going to use the most intense continuous muon beam in the world, generating 10^{8} muon stops per second in the target placed at the center of the Mu3e. Mu3e will use three main technologies for particle detection. The tracking will done through ultra-thin (50 - 70 mu m) pixel detectors based on MuPix11 sensors. These are high-voltage monolithic active pixel sensors (HV-MAPS) with a sim 23~mum spatial resolution. The timing will be done through scintillating fibres (sim 250 ps) and tiles (sim 40 ps), coupled to silicon photomultipliers and read out by MuTRiG3 ASICs. A triggerless DAQ system based on FPGAs will collect data from the detectors, which will then undergo reconstruction in a GPU filter farm. The assembly of the detectors has started, with a detector commissioning beam time planned for 2025. This document reports on the status of the construction, installation, and data-taking plans for the near future. 1 authors · Jan 24, 2025
- Ultra-sensitive solid-state organic molecular microwave quantum receiver High-accuracy microwave sensing is widely demanded in various fields, ranging from cosmology to microwave quantum technology. Quantum receivers based on inorganic solid-state spin systems are promising candidates for such purpose because of the stability and compatibility, but their best sensitivity is currently limited to a few pT/rm{Hz}. Here, by utilising an enhanced readout scheme with the state-of-the-art solid-state maser technology, we develop a robust microwave quantum receiver functioned by organic molecular spins at ambient conditions. Owing to the maser amplification, the sensitivity of the receiver achieves 6.14 pm 0.17 fT/rm{Hz} which exceeds three orders of magnitude than that of the inorganic solid-state quantum receivers. The heterodyne detection without additional local oscillators improves bandwidth of the receiver and allows frequency detection. The scheme can be extended to other solid-state spin systems without complicated control pulses and thus enables practical applications such as electron spin resonance spectroscopy, dark matter searches, and astronomical observations. 12 authors · May 23, 2024
- Detectors for Safe and Reliable LLMs: Implementations, Uses, and Limitations Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a variety of risks, from non-faithful output to biased and toxic generations. Due to several limiting factors surrounding LLMs (training cost, API access, data availability, etc.), it may not always be feasible to impose direct safety constraints on a deployed model. Therefore, an efficient and reliable alternative is required. To this end, we present our ongoing efforts to create and deploy a library of detectors: compact and easy-to-build classification models that provide labels for various harms. In addition to the detectors themselves, we discuss a wide range of uses for these detector models - from acting as guardrails to enabling effective AI governance. We also deep dive into inherent challenges in their development and discuss future work aimed at making the detectors more reliable and broadening their scope. 38 authors · Mar 9, 2024
- Neutron capture measurements for s-process nucleosynthesis; A review about CERN n_TOF developments and contributions This article presents a review about the main CERN n\_TOF contributions to the field of neutron-capture experiments of interest for s-process nucleosynthesis studies over the last 25 years, with special focus on the measurement of radioactive isotopes. A few recent capture experiments on stable isotopes of astrophysical interest are also discussed. Results on s-process branching nuclei are appropriate to illustrate how advances in detection systems and upgrades in the facility have enabled increasingly challenging experiments and, as a consequence, have led to a better understanding and modeling of the s-process mechanism of nucleosynthesis. New endeavors combining radioactive-ion beams from ISOLDE for the production of radioisotopically pure samples for activation experiments at the new NEAR facility at n\_TOF are briefly discussed. On the basis of these new exciting results, also current limitations of state-of-the-art TOF and activation techniques will be depicted, thereby showing the pressing need for further upgrades and enhancements on both facilities and detection systems. A brief account of the potential technique based on inverse kinematics for direct neutron-capture measurements is also presented. 146 authors · Feb 14, 2025
1 Scaling Physical Reasoning with the PHYSICS Dataset Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on advanced reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding competitions. Meanwhile, physics, despite being both reasoning-intensive and essential to real-world understanding, received limited academic and industrial attention. This paper introduces PHYSICS, a dataset containing 16,568 high-quality physics problems spanning subjects and difficulty levels, to facilitate this issue. Specifically, PHYSICS is curated with exercises from over 100 textbooks through a carefully designed pipeline for quality control. It covers five major physics domains: Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Thermodynamics, Optics, and Modern Physics. It also spans a wide range of difficulty levels, from high school to graduate-level physics courses. To utilize the data for improving and evaluating the model's physical reasoning capabilities, we split the dataset into training and test sets, and provide reasoning paths generated by powerful reasoning models for the training data to facilitate model training. In addition, for the evaluation part, we find that existing evaluation frameworks exhibit biases in aspects such as units, simplification, and precision in physics domain. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we introduce a Rule+Model evaluation framework tailored to physics problems. Our evaluations on current state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models highlight the limitations of current models in handling physics-related tasks. We hope that our dataset and evaluation methodology will jointly advance the development of LLMs in the field of physics. 12 authors · May 21, 2025
- Indirect dark matter searches at ultrahigh energy neutrino detectors High to ultrahigh energy neutrino detectors can uniquely probe the properties of dark matter χ by searching for the secondary products produced through annihilation and/or decay processes. We evaluate the sensitivities to dark matter thermally averaged annihilation cross section langleσvrangle and partial decay width into neutrinos Γ_{χrightarrowνbarν} (in the mass scale 10^7 leq m_χ/{rm GeV} leq 10^{15}) for next generation observatories like POEMMA and GRAND. We show that in the range 10^7 leq m_χ/{rm GeV} leq 10^{11}, space-based Cherenkov detectors like POEMMA have the advantage of full-sky coverage and rapid slewing, enabling an optimized dark matter observation strategy focusing on the Galactic center. We also show that ground-based radio detectors such as GRAND can achieve high sensitivities and high duty cycles in radio quiet areas. We compare the sensitivities of next generation neutrino experiments with existing constraints from IceCube and updated 90\% C.L. upper limits on langleσvrangle and Γ_{χrightarrowνbarν} using results from the Pierre Auger Collaboration and ANITA. We show that in the range 10^7 leq m_χ/{rm GeV} leq 10^{11} POEMMA and GRAND10k will improve the neutrino sensitivity to particle dark matter by factors of 2 to 10 over existing limits, whereas GRAND200k will improve this sensitivity by two orders of magnitude. In the range 10^{11} leq m_χ/{rm GeV} leq 10^{15}, POEMMA's fluorescence observation mode will achieve an unprecedented sensitivity to dark matter properties. Finally, we highlight the importance of the uncertainties related to the dark matter distribution in the Galactic halo, using the latest fit and estimates of the Galactic parameters. 8 authors · Jun 8, 2021
- Demonstrating Agreement between Radio and Fluorescence Measurements of the Depth of Maximum of Extensive Air Showers at the Pierre Auger Observatory We show, for the first time, radio measurements of the depth of shower maximum (X_max) of air showers induced by cosmic rays that are compared to measurements of the established fluorescence method at the same location. Using measurements at the Pierre Auger Observatory we show full compatibility between our radio and the previously published fluorescence data set, and between a subset of air showers observed simultaneously with both radio and fluorescence techniques, a measurement setup unique to the Pierre Auger Observatory. Furthermore, we show radio X_max resolution as a function of energy and demonstrate the ability to make competitive high-resolution X_max measurements with even a sparse radio array. With this, we show that the radio technique is capable of cosmic-ray mass composition studies, both at Auger and at other experiments. 375 authors · Oct 30, 2023
8 PhysBERT: A Text Embedding Model for Physics Scientific Literature The specialized language and complex concepts in physics pose significant challenges for information extraction through Natural Language Processing (NLP). Central to effective NLP applications is the text embedding model, which converts text into dense vector representations for efficient information retrieval and semantic analysis. In this work, we introduce PhysBERT, the first physics-specific text embedding model. Pre-trained on a curated corpus of 1.2 million arXiv physics papers and fine-tuned with supervised data, PhysBERT outperforms leading general-purpose models on physics-specific tasks including the effectiveness in fine-tuning for specific physics subdomains. 3 authors · Aug 18, 2024 1
1 Hypernuclear event detection in the nuclear emulsion with Monte Carlo simulation and machine learning This study developed a novel method for detecting hypernuclear events recorded in nuclear emulsion sheets using machine learning techniques. The artificial neural network-based object detection model was trained on surrogate images created through Monte Carlo simulations and image-style transformations using generative adversarial networks. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated using alpha-decay events obtained from the J-PARC E07 emulsion data. The model achieved approximately twice the detection efficiency of conventional image processing and reduced the time spent on manual visual inspection by approximately 1/17. The established method was successfully applied to the detection of hypernuclear events. This approach is a state-of-the-art tool for discovering rare events recorded in nuclear emulsion sheets without any real data for training. 21 authors · May 1, 2023
- Detector configuration of KAGRA - the Japanese cryogenic gravitational-wave detector Construction of the Japanese second-generation gravitational-wave detector KAGRA has been started. In the next 6 \sim 7 years, we will be able to observe the space-time ripple from faraway galaxies. KAGRA is equipped with the latest advanced technologies. The entire 3-km long detector is located in the underground to be isolated from the seismic motion, the core optics are cooled down to 20 K to reduce thermal fluctuations, and quantum non-demolition techniques are used to decrease quantum noise. In this paper, we introduce the detector configuration of KAGRA; its design, strategy, and downselection of parameters. 1 authors · Nov 30, 2011
- Science with the TianQin observatory: Preliminary results on stellar-mass binary black holes We study the prospect of using TianQin to detect stellar-mass binary black holes (SBBHs). We estimate the expected detection number as well as the precision of parameter estimation on SBBH inspirals, using five different population models. We note TianQin can possibly detect a few SBBH inspirals with signal to noise ratios greater than 12; lowering the threshold and combining multiple detectors can both boost the detection number. The source parameters can be recovered with good precision for most events above the detection threshold. For example, the precision of the merger time most likely occurs near 1s, making it possible to guide the detection of the ground-based detectors, the precision of the eccentricity e_0 most likely occurs near 10^{-4}, making it possible to distinguish the formation channels, and the precision of the mass parameter is better than 10^{-6} in general and most likely occurs near 10^{-7}. We note, in particular, that for a typical merger event, the error volume is likely to be small enough to contain only the host galaxy, which could greatly help in the study of gravitational wave cosmology and relevant studies through the multimessenger observation. 4 authors · Apr 29, 2020
- Enhancing the significance of astrophysical events with multimessenger coincidences Coincident multimessenger observations of cosmic sources can offer numerous benefits, especially when used in the context of synergistic astrophysics. One significant advantage is enhancing the detection significance of separate detectors by correlating their data and assuming joint emission. We have formulated an approach for updating the Bayesian posterior probability of an astrophysical origin, namely p_{rm astro}, relying on multimessenger coincidences assuming an emission model. The description is applicable to any combination of messengers. We demonstrated the formalism for the gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos case. Applying our method to the public data of candidate coincident high-energy neutrinos with subthreshold gravitational-wave triggers, we found that in the case of highly energetic neutrino coincidences, p_{rm astro} can increase from approximately sim 0.1 to sim 0.9. The amount of improvement depends on the assumed joint emission model. If models are trusted, the marked improvement makes subthreshold detections much more confident. Moreover, the model dependency can also be used to test the consistency of different models. This work is a crucial step toward the goal of uniting all detectors on equal footing into a statistically integrated, Earth-sized observatory for comprehensive multimessenger astrophysics. 4 authors · Jul 11, 2024
- A low-cost ultraviolet-to-infrared absolute quantum efficiency characterization system of detectors We present a low-cost ultraviolet to infrared absolute quantum efficiency detector characterization system developed using commercial off-the-shelf components. The key components of the experiment include a light source,a regulated power supply, a monochromator, an integrating sphere, and a calibrated photodiode. We provide a step-by-step procedure to construct the photon and quantum efficiency transfer curves of imaging sensors. We present results for the GSENSE 2020 BSI CMOS sensor and the Sony IMX 455 BSI CMOS sensor. As a reference for similar characterizations, we provide a list of parts and associated costs along with images of our setup. 11 authors · Jul 26, 2022
- Re-Simulation-based Self-Supervised Learning for Pre-Training Foundation Models Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is at the core of training modern large machine learning models, providing a scheme for learning powerful representations that can be used in a variety of downstream tasks. However, SSL strategies must be adapted to the type of training data and downstream tasks required. We propose RS3L ("Re-simulation-based self-supervised representation learning"), a novel simulation-based SSL strategy that employs a method of re-simulation to drive data augmentation for contrastive learning in the physical sciences, particularly, in fields that rely on stochastic simulators. By intervening in the middle of the simulation process and re-running simulation components downstream of the intervention, we generate multiple realizations of an event, thus producing a set of augmentations covering all physics-driven variations available in the simulator. Using experiments from high-energy physics, we explore how this strategy may enable the development of a foundation model; we show how RS3L pre-training enables powerful performance in downstream tasks such as discrimination of a variety of objects and uncertainty mitigation. In addition to our results, we make the RS3L dataset publicly available for further studies on how to improve SSL strategies. 5 authors · Mar 11, 2024
134 P1: Mastering Physics Olympiads with Reinforcement Learning Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has moved the frontier from puzzle-solving to science-grade reasoning-the kind needed to tackle problems whose answers must stand against nature, not merely fit a rubric. Physics is the sharpest test of this shift, which binds symbols to reality in a fundamental way, serving as the cornerstone of most modern technologies. In this work, we manage to advance physics research by developing large language models with exceptional physics reasoning capabilities, especially excel at solving Olympiad-level physics problems. We introduce P1, a family of open-source physics reasoning models trained entirely through reinforcement learning (RL). Among them, P1-235B-A22B is the first open-source model with Gold-medal performance at the latest International Physics Olympiad (IPhO 2025), and wins 12 gold medals out of 13 international/regional physics competitions in 2024/2025. P1-30B-A3B also surpasses almost all other open-source models on IPhO 2025, getting a silver medal. Further equipped with an agentic framework PhysicsMinions, P1-235B-A22B+PhysicsMinions achieves overall No.1 on IPhO 2025, and obtains the highest average score over the 13 physics competitions. Besides physics, P1 models also present great performance on other reasoning tasks like math and coding, showing the great generalibility of P1 series. 28 authors · Nov 17, 2025 5
- Invited Article: miniTimeCube We present the development of the miniTimeCube (mTC), a novel compact neutrino detector. The mTC is a multipurpose detector, aiming to detect not only neutrinos but also fast/thermal neutrons. Potential applications include the counterproliferation of nuclear materials and the investigation of antineutrino short-baseline effects. The mTC is a plastic 0.2% ^{10}B - doped scintillator (13 cm)^3 cube surrounded by 24 Micro-Channel Plate (MCP) photon detectors, each with an 8times8 anode totaling 1536 individual channels/pixels viewing the scintillator. It uses custom-made electronics modules which mount on top of the MCPs, making our detector compact and able to both distinguish different types of events and reject noise in real time. The detector is currently deployed and being tested at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) nuclear reactor (20 MW_th) in Gaithersburg, MD. A shield for further tests is being constructed, and calibration and upgrades are ongoing. The mTC's improved spatiotemporal resolution will allow for determination of incident particle directions beyond previous capabilities. 19 authors · Feb 3, 2016
- Digital Discovery of interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors Gravitational waves, detected a century after they were first theorized, are spacetime distortions caused by some of the most cataclysmic events in the universe, including black hole mergers and supernovae. The successful detection of these waves has been made possible by ingenious detectors designed by human experts. Beyond these successful designs, the vast space of experimental configurations remains largely unexplored, offering an exciting territory potentially rich in innovative and unconventional detection strategies. Here, we demonstrate the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to systematically explore this enormous space, revealing novel topologies for gravitational wave (GW) detectors that outperform current next-generation designs under realistic experimental constraints. Our results span a broad range of astrophysical targets, such as black hole and neutron star mergers, supernovae, and primordial GW sources. Moreover, we are able to conceptualize the initially unorthodox discovered designs, emphasizing the potential of using AI algorithms not only in discovering but also in understanding these novel topologies. We've assembled more than 50 superior solutions in a publicly available Gravitational Wave Detector Zoo which could lead to many new surprising techniques. At a bigger picture, our approach is not limited to gravitational wave detectors and can be extended to AI-driven design of experiments across diverse domains of fundamental physics. 3 authors · Dec 5, 2023 1
- A Poisson Process AutoDecoder for X-ray Sources X-ray observing facilities, such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the eROSITA, have detected millions of astronomical sources associated with high-energy phenomena. The arrival of photons as a function of time follows a Poisson process and can vary by orders-of-magnitude, presenting obstacles for common tasks such as source classification, physical property derivation, and anomaly detection. Previous work has either failed to directly capture the Poisson nature of the data or only focuses on Poisson rate function reconstruction. In this work, we present Poisson Process AutoDecoder (PPAD). PPAD is a neural field decoder that maps fixed-length latent features to continuous Poisson rate functions across energy band and time via unsupervised learning. PPAD reconstructs the rate function and yields a representation at the same time. We demonstrate the efficacy of PPAD via reconstruction, regression, classification and anomaly detection experiments using the Chandra Source Catalog. 4 authors · Feb 3, 2025
1 Multiple-photon disambiguation on stripline-anode Micro-Channel Plates Large-Area Picosecond Photo-Detectors (LAPPDs) show great potential for expanding the performance envelope of Micro-Channel Plates (MCPs) to areas of up to 20 x 20 cm and larger. Such scaling introduces new challenges, including how to meet the electronics readout burden of ever larger area MCPs. One solution is to replace the traditional grid anode used for readout with a microwave stripline anode, thus allowing the channel count to scale with MCP width rather than area. However, stripline anodes introduce new issues not commonly dealt with in grid-anodes, especially as their length increases. One of these issues is the near simultaneous arrival of multiple photons on the detector, creating possible confusion about how to reconstruct their arrival times and positions. We propose a maximum a posteriori solution to the problem and verify its performance in simulated scintillator and water-Cherenkov detectors. 5 authors · May 2, 2018
- Is Tokenization Needed for Masked Particle Modelling? In this work, we significantly enhance masked particle modeling (MPM), a self-supervised learning scheme for constructing highly expressive representations of unordered sets relevant to developing foundation models for high-energy physics. In MPM, a model is trained to recover the missing elements of a set, a learning objective that requires no labels and can be applied directly to experimental data. We achieve significant performance improvements over previous work on MPM by addressing inefficiencies in the implementation and incorporating a more powerful decoder. We compare several pre-training tasks and introduce new reconstruction methods that utilize conditional generative models without data tokenization or discretization. We show that these new methods outperform the tokenized learning objective from the original MPM on a new test bed for foundation models for jets, which includes using a wide variety of downstream tasks relevant to jet physics, such as classification, secondary vertex finding, and track identification. 8 authors · Sep 19, 2024
15 "PhyWorldBench": A Comprehensive Evaluation of Physical Realism in Text-to-Video Models Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in creating high-quality, photorealistic content. However, their ability to accurately simulate physical phenomena remains a critical and unresolved challenge. This paper presents PhyWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate video generation models based on their adherence to the laws of physics. The benchmark covers multiple levels of physical phenomena, ranging from fundamental principles like object motion and energy conservation to more complex scenarios involving rigid body interactions and human or animal motion. Additionally, we introduce a novel ""Anti-Physics"" category, where prompts intentionally violate real-world physics, enabling the assessment of whether models can follow such instructions while maintaining logical consistency. Besides large-scale human evaluation, we also design a simple yet effective method that could utilize current MLLM to evaluate the physics realism in a zero-shot fashion. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art text-to-video generation models, including five open-source and five proprietary models, with a detailed comparison and analysis. we identify pivotal challenges models face in adhering to real-world physics. Through systematic testing of their outputs across 1,050 curated prompts-spanning fundamental, composite, and anti-physics scenarios-we identify pivotal challenges these models face in adhering to real-world physics. We then rigorously examine their performance on diverse physical phenomena with varying prompt types, deriving targeted recommendations for crafting prompts that enhance fidelity to physical principles. 11 authors · Jul 17, 2025 1
2 Using Machine Learning for Anomaly Detection on a System-on-Chip under Gamma Radiation The emergence of new nanoscale technologies has imposed significant challenges to designing reliable electronic systems in radiation environments. A few types of radiation like Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects often cause permanent damages on such nanoscale electronic devices, and current state-of-the-art technologies to tackle TID make use of expensive radiation-hardened devices. This paper focuses on a novel and different approach: using machine learning algorithms on consumer electronic level Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to tackle TID effects and monitor them to replace before they stop working. This condition has a research challenge to anticipate when the board results in a total failure due to TID effects. We observed internal measurements of the FPGA boards under gamma radiation and used three different anomaly detection machine learning (ML) algorithms to detect anomalies in the sensor measurements in a gamma-radiated environment. The statistical results show a highly significant relationship between the gamma radiation exposure levels and the board measurements. Moreover, our anomaly detection results have shown that a One-Class Support Vector Machine with Radial Basis Function Kernel has an average Recall score of 0.95. Also, all anomalies can be detected before the boards stop working. 6 authors · Jan 5, 2022
3 PhysicsArena: The First Multimodal Physics Reasoning Benchmark Exploring Variable, Process, and Solution Dimensions Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in diverse reasoning tasks, yet their application to complex physics reasoning remains underexplored. Physics reasoning presents unique challenges, requiring grounding in physical conditions and the interpretation of multimodal information. Current physics benchmarks are limited, often focusing on text-only inputs or solely on problem-solving, thereby overlooking the critical intermediate steps of variable identification and process formulation. To address these limitations, we introduce PhysicsArena, the first multimodal physics reasoning benchmark designed to holistically evaluate MLLMs across three critical dimensions: variable identification, physical process formulation, and solution derivation. PhysicsArena aims to provide a comprehensive platform for assessing and advancing the multimodal physics reasoning abilities of MLLMs. 11 authors · May 21, 2025
- Statistics of X-Ray Polarization Measurements The polarization of an X-ray beam that produces electrons with velocity components perpendicular to the beam generates an azimuthal distribution of the ejected electrons. We present methods for simulating and for analyzing the angular dependence of electron detections which enable us to derive simple analytical expressions for useful statistical properties of observable data. The derivations are verified by simulations. While we confirm the results of previous work on this topic, we provide an extension needed for analytical treatment of the full range of possible polarization amplitudes. 2 authors · Jan 9, 2015
- Fate and detectability of rare gas hydride ions in nova ejecta: A case study with nova templates HeH^+ was the first heteronuclear molecule to form in the metal-free Universe after the Big Bang. The molecule gained significant attention following its first circumstellar detection in the young and dense planetary nebula NGC 7027. We target some hydride ions associated with the noble gases (HeH^+, ArH^+, and NeH^+) to investigate their formation in harsh environments like the nova outburst region. We use a photoionization modeling (based on previously published best-fit physical parameters) of the moderately fast ONe type nova, QU Vulpeculae 1984, and the CO type novae, RS Ophiuchi and V1716 Scorpii. Our steady-state modeling reveals a convincing amount of HeH^+, especially in the dense clump of RS Ophiuchi and V1716 Scorpii. The calculated upper limit on the surface brightness of HeH^+ transitions suggests that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could detect some of them, particularly in sources like RS Ophiuchi and V1716 Scorpii, which have similar physical and chemical conditions and evolution. It must be clearly noted that the sources studied are used as templates, and not as targets for observations. The detection of these lines could be useful for determining the physical conditions in similar types of systems and for validating our predictions based on new electron-impact ro-vibrational collisional data at temperatures of up to 20,000 K. 9 authors · Nov 8, 2024
- Object Detection as Probabilistic Set Prediction Accurate uncertainty estimates are essential for deploying deep object detectors in safety-critical systems. The development and evaluation of probabilistic object detectors have been hindered by shortcomings in existing performance measures, which tend to involve arbitrary thresholds or limit the detector's choice of distributions. In this work, we propose to view object detection as a set prediction task where detectors predict the distribution over the set of objects. Using the negative log-likelihood for random finite sets, we present a proper scoring rule for evaluating and training probabilistic object detectors. The proposed method can be applied to existing probabilistic detectors, is free from thresholds, and enables fair comparison between architectures. Three different types of detectors are evaluated on the COCO dataset. Our results indicate that the training of existing detectors is optimized toward non-probabilistic metrics. We hope to encourage the development of new object detectors that can accurately estimate their own uncertainty. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/pmb-nll. 3 authors · Mar 15, 2022
- Charged lepton flavor violation in light of the muon magnetic moment anomaly and colliders Any observation of charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV) implies the existence of new physics beyond the SM in charged lepton sector. CLFV interactions may also contribute to the muon magnetic moment and explain the discrepancy between the SM prediction and the recent muon g-2 precision measurement at Fermilab. We consider the most general SM gauge invariant Lagrangian of Delta L=0 bileptons with CLFV couplings and investigate the interplay of low-energy precision experiments and colliders in light of the muon magnetic moment anomaly. We go beyond previous work by demonstrating the sensitivity of the LHC, the MACE experiment, a proposed muonium-antimuonium conversion experiment, and a muon collider. Currently-available LHC data is already able to probe unexplored parameter space via the CLFV process pptogamma^*/Z^*to ell_1^pm ell_1^pm ell_2^mp ell_2^mp. 4 authors · Apr 9, 2021
- A Method to Simultaneously Facilitate All Jet Physics Tasks Machine learning has become an essential tool in jet physics. Due to their complex, high-dimensional nature, jets can be explored holistically by neural networks in ways that are not possible manually. However, innovations in all areas of jet physics are proceeding in parallel. We show that specially constructed machine learning models trained for a specific jet classification task can improve the accuracy, precision, or speed of all other jet physics tasks. This is demonstrated by training on a particular multiclass generation and classification task and then using the learned representation for different generation and classification tasks, for datasets with a different (full) detector simulation, for jets from a different collision system (pp versus ep), for generative models, for likelihood ratio estimation, and for anomaly detection. We consider, our OmniLearn approach thus as a jet-physics foundation model. It is made publicly available for use in any area where state-of-the-art precision is required for analyses involving jets and their substructure. 2 authors · Feb 18, 2025
- Lamarr: LHCb ultra-fast simulation based on machine learning models deployed within Gauss About 90% of the computing resources available to the LHCb experiment has been spent to produce simulated data samples for Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The upgraded LHCb detector will be able to collect larger data samples, requiring many more simulated events to analyze the data to be collected in Run 3. Simulation is a key necessity of analysis to interpret signal, reject background and measure efficiencies. The needed simulation will far exceed the pledged resources, requiring an evolution in technologies and techniques to produce these simulated data samples. In this contribution, we discuss Lamarr, a Gaudi-based framework to speed-up the simulation production parameterizing both the detector response and the reconstruction algorithms of the LHCb experiment. Deep Generative Models powered by several algorithms and strategies are employed to effectively parameterize the high-level response of the single components of the LHCb detector, encoding within neural networks the experimental errors and uncertainties introduced in the detection and reconstruction phases. Where possible, models are trained directly on real data, statistically subtracting any background components by applying appropriate reweighing procedures. Embedding Lamarr in the general LHCb Gauss Simulation framework allows to combine its execution with any of the available generators in a seamless way. The resulting software package enables a simulation process independent of the detailed simulation used to date. 1 authors · Mar 20, 2023
- A Machine Learning Pipeline for Hunting Hidden Axion Signals in Pulsar Dispersion Measurements In the axion model, electromagnetic waves interacting with axions induce frequency-dependent time delays, determined by the axion mass and decay constant. These small delays are difficult to detect, making traditional methods ineffective. To address this, we computed time delays for various parameters and found a prominent dispersion signal when the wave frequency equals half the axion mass. Based on this, we developed a machine learning-based pipeline, achieving 95\% classification accuracy and demonstrating strong detection capability in low signal-to-noise data. Applying this to PSR J1933-6211, we found no axion-induced delays within current sensitivity limits. While existing constraints are limited by atomic clock resolution in radio telescopes, future advances in optical clocks and broader bandwidths will enable more extensive searches. In particular, combining high-precision optical clocks with next-generation radio telescopes, such as the Qitai Radio Telescope, could improve decay constant constraints by four orders of magnitude for axion masses in the 10^{-6} sim 10^{-4} eV range. 6 authors · May 22, 2025
20 Present and Future Generalization of Synthetic Image Detectors The continued release of new and better image generation models increases the demand for synthetic image detectors. In such a dynamic field, detectors need to be able to generalize widely and be robust to uncontrolled alterations. The present work is motivated by this setting, when looking at the role of time, image transformations and data sources, for detector generalization. In these experiments, none of the evaluated detectors is found universal, but results indicate an ensemble could be. Experiments on data collected in the wild show this task to be more challenging than the one defined by large-scale datasets, pointing to a gap between experimentation and actual practice. Finally, we observe a race equilibrium effect, where better generators lead to better detectors, and vice versa. We hypothesize this pushes the field towards a perpetually close race between generators and detectors. 3 authors · Sep 21, 2024 3
- Particle Trajectory Representation Learning with Masked Point Modeling Effective self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have been key to unlocking large datasets for representation learning. While many promising methods have been developed using online corpora and captioned photographs, their application to scientific domains, where data encodes highly specialized knowledge, remains a challenge. Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPCs) provide high-resolution 3D imaging for fundamental physics, but analysis of their sparse, complex point cloud data often relies on supervised methods trained on large simulations, introducing potential biases. We introduce the Point-based Liquid Argon Masked Autoencoder (PoLAr-MAE), applying masked point modeling to unlabeled LArTPC images using domain-specific volumetric tokenization and energy prediction. We show this SSL approach learns physically meaningful trajectory representations directly from data. This yields remarkable data efficiency: fine-tuning on just 100 labeled events achieves track/shower semantic segmentation performance comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised baseline trained on >100,000 events. Furthermore, internal attention maps exhibit emergent instance segmentation of particle trajectories. While challenges remain, particularly for fine-grained features, we make concrete SSL's potential for building a foundation model for LArTPC image analysis capable of serving as a common base for all data reconstruction tasks. To facilitate further progress, we release PILArNet-M, a large dataset of 1M LArTPC events. Project site: https://youngsm.com/polarmae. 3 authors · Feb 4, 2025
7 PhysReason: A Comprehensive Benchmark towards Physics-Based Reasoning Large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities across various domains, especially mathematics and logic reasoning. However, current evaluations overlook physics-based reasoning - a complex task requiring physics theorems and constraints. We present PhysReason, a 1,200-problem benchmark comprising knowledge-based (25%) and reasoning-based (75%) problems, where the latter are divided into three difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard). Notably, problems require an average of 8.1 solution steps, with hard requiring 15.6, reflecting the complexity of physics-based reasoning. We propose the Physics Solution Auto Scoring Framework, incorporating efficient answer-level and comprehensive step-level evaluations. Top-performing models like Deepseek-R1, Gemini-2.0-Flash-Thinking, and o3-mini-high achieve less than 60% on answer-level evaluation, with performance dropping from knowledge questions (75.11%) to hard problems (31.95%). Through step-level evaluation, we identified four key bottlenecks: Physics Theorem Application, Physics Process Understanding, Calculation, and Physics Condition Analysis. These findings position PhysReason as a novel and comprehensive benchmark for evaluating physics-based reasoning capabilities in large language models. Our code and data will be published at https:/dxzxy12138.github.io/PhysReason. 9 authors · Feb 17, 2025 2
- Observation of four-top-quark production in the multilepton final state with the ATLAS detector This paper presents the observation of four-top-quark (tttt) production in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. The analysis is performed using an integrated luminosity of 140 fb^{-1} at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected using the ATLAS detector. Events containing two leptons with the same electric charge or at least three leptons (electrons or muons) are selected. Event kinematics are used to separate signal from background through a multivariate discriminant, and dedicated control regions are used to constrain the dominant backgrounds. The observed (expected) significance of the measured tttt signal with respect to the standard model (SM) background-only hypothesis is 6.1 (4.3) standard deviations. The tttt production cross section is measured to be 22.5^{+6.6}_{-5.5} fb, consistent with the SM prediction of 12.0 pm 2.4 fb within 1.8 standard deviations. Data are also used to set limits on the three-top-quark production cross section, being an irreducible background not measured previously, and to constrain the top-Higgs Yukawa coupling and effective field theory operator coefficients that affect tttt production. 1 authors · Mar 27, 2023
- Accelerating Resonance Searches via Signature-Oriented Pre-training The search for heavy resonances beyond the Standard Model (BSM) is a key objective at the LHC. While the recent use of advanced deep neural networks for boosted-jet tagging significantly enhances the sensitivity of dedicated searches, it is limited to specific final states, leaving vast potential BSM phase space underexplored. We introduce a novel experimental method, Signature-Oriented Pre-training for Heavy-resonance ObservatioN (Sophon), which leverages deep learning to cover an extensive number of boosted final states. Pre-trained on the comprehensive JetClass-II dataset, the Sophon model learns intricate jet signatures, ensuring the optimal constructions of various jet tagging discriminates and enabling high-performance transfer learning capabilities. We show that the method can not only push widespread model-specific searches to their sensitivity frontier, but also greatly improve model-agnostic approaches, accelerating LHC resonance searches in a broad sense. 12 authors · May 21, 2024
- The LHCb ultra-fast simulation option, Lamarr: design and validation Detailed detector simulation is the major consumer of CPU resources at LHCb, having used more than 90% of the total computing budget during Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As data is collected by the upgraded LHCb detector during Run 3 of the LHC, larger requests for simulated data samples are necessary, and will far exceed the pledged resources of the experiment, even with existing fast simulation options. An evolution of technologies and techniques to produce simulated samples is mandatory to meet the upcoming needs of analysis to interpret signal versus background and measure efficiencies. In this context, we propose Lamarr, a Gaudi-based framework designed to offer the fastest solution for the simulation of the LHCb detector. Lamarr consists of a pipeline of modules parameterizing both the detector response and the reconstruction algorithms of the LHCb experiment. Most of the parameterizations are made of Deep Generative Models and Gradient Boosted Decision Trees trained on simulated samples or alternatively, where possible, on real data. Embedding Lamarr in the general LHCb Gauss Simulation framework allows combining its execution with any of the available generators in a seamless way. Lamarr has been validated by comparing key reconstructed quantities with Detailed Simulation. Good agreement of the simulated distributions is obtained with two-order-of-magnitude speed-up of the simulation phase. 12 authors · Sep 22, 2023
- Visible and Invisible Pseudoscalar Meson Decays from Anomaly Sum Rules The decays of pseudoscalar mesons to real and virtual photons as well as neutrino-antineutrino pairs are considered in the framework of the dispersive method based on Anomaly Sum Rules. The contribution of singlet channel involving the new non-perturbative gluon form factor of virtual photon B(q^2) is systematically taken into account. The detailed analysis of its dependence on photon virtuality q^2 relying on the available data for meson transition fomfactors is performed. It is shown that B has quite a nontrivial structure at q^2 sim 1 GeV^2 which may be a signal of the existence of pseudoscalar glueball with a mass about 1.5-2 GeV. The calculation of the decay to νbar ν pairs leads to the compatibility with the result of Arnellos, Marciano and Parsa of 1982, when pion decay is considered neglecting the mixing effects. The account for these effects results, however, in the enhancement of pion branching ratio by a factor of 3, while that for eta decay is larger by several orders of magnitude. It is stressed, that dependence on the pair invariant mass is entirely defined by QCD and coincides with that of the meson transition form factor. The role of obtained results for the physics at HHaS detector at HIAF is discussed. 4 authors · Dec 17, 2025
- GW-YOLO: Multi-transient segmentation in LIGO using computer vision Time series data and their time-frequency representation from gravitational-wave interferometers present multiple opportunities for the use of artificial intelligence methods associated with signal and image processing. Closely connected with this is the real-time aspect associated with gravitational-wave interferometers and the astrophysical observations they perform; the discovery potential of these instruments can be significantly enhanced when data processing can be achieved in O(1s) timescales. In this work, we introduce a novel signal and noise identification tool based on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) object detection framework. For its application into gravitational waves, we will refer to it as GW-YOLO. This tool can provide scene identification capabilities and essential information regarding whether an observed transient is any combination of noise and signal. Additionally, it supplies detailed time-frequency coordinates of the detected objects in the form of pixel masks, an essential property that can be used to understand and characterize astrophysical sources, as well as instrumental noise. The simultaneous identification of noise and signal, combined with precise pixel-level localization, represents a significant advancement in gravitational-wave data analysis. Our approach yields a 50\% detection efficiency for binary black hole signals at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 15 when such signals overlap with transient noise artifacts. When noise artifacts overlap with binary neutron star signals, our algorithm attains 50\% detection efficiency at an SNR of 30. This presents the first quantitative assessment of the ability to detect astrophysical events overlapping with realistic, instrument noise present in gravitational-wave interferometers. 3 authors · Aug 24, 2025
1 Probing the Critical Point (CritPt) of AI Reasoning: a Frontier Physics Research Benchmark While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, open-ended challenges found in frontier physics research? And crucially, what kinds of reasoning tasks do physicists want LLMs to assist with? To address these questions, we present the CritPt (Complex Research using Integrated Thinking - Physics Test, pronounced "critical point"), the first benchmark designed to test LLMs on unpublished, research-level reasoning tasks that broadly covers modern physics research areas, including condensed matter, quantum physics, atomic, molecular & optical physics, astrophysics, high energy physics, mathematical physics, statistical physics, nuclear physics, nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics and biophysics. CritPt consists of 71 composite research challenges designed to simulate full-scale research projects at the entry level, which are also decomposed to 190 simpler checkpoint tasks for more fine-grained insights. All problems are newly created by 50+ active physics researchers based on their own research. Every problem is hand-curated to admit a guess-resistant and machine-verifiable answer and is evaluated by an automated grading pipeline heavily customized for advanced physics-specific output formats. We find that while current state-of-the-art LLMs show early promise on isolated checkpoints, they remain far from being able to reliably solve full research-scale challenges: the best average accuracy among base models is only 4.0% , achieved by GPT-5 (high), moderately rising to around 10% when equipped with coding tools. Through the realistic yet standardized evaluation offered by CritPt, we highlight a large disconnect between current model capabilities and realistic physics research demands, offering a foundation to guide the development of scientifically grounded AI tools. 64 authors · Sep 30, 2025 2
1 Exploring Different Levels of Supervision for Detecting and Localizing Solar Panels on Remote Sensing Imagery This study investigates object presence detection and localization in remote sensing imagery, focusing on solar panel recognition. We explore different levels of supervision, evaluating three models: a fully supervised object detector, a weakly supervised image classifier with CAM-based localization, and a minimally supervised anomaly detector. The classifier excels in binary presence detection (0.79 F1-score), while the object detector (0.72) offers precise localization. The anomaly detector requires more data for viable performance. Fusion of model results shows potential accuracy gains. CAM impacts localization modestly, with GradCAM, GradCAM++, and HiResCAM yielding superior results. Notably, the classifier remains robust with less data, in contrast to the object detector. 3 authors · Sep 19, 2023
- Enhancing Physical Plausibility in Video Generation by Reasoning the Implausibility Diffusion models can generate realistic videos, but existing methods rely on implicitly learning physical reasoning from large-scale text-video datasets, which is costly, difficult to scale, and still prone to producing implausible motions that violate fundamental physical laws. We introduce a training-free framework that improves physical plausibility at inference time by explicitly reasoning about implausibility and guiding the generation away from it. Specifically, we employ a lightweight physics-aware reasoning pipeline to construct counterfactual prompts that deliberately encode physics-violating behaviors. Then, we propose a novel Synchronized Decoupled Guidance (SDG) strategy, which leverages these prompts through synchronized directional normalization to counteract lagged suppression and trajectory-decoupled denoising to mitigate cumulative trajectory bias, ensuring that implausible content is suppressed immediately and consistently throughout denoising. Experiments across different physical domains show that our approach substantially enhances physical fidelity while maintaining photorealism, despite requiring no additional training. Ablation studies confirm the complementary effectiveness of both the physics-aware reasoning component and SDG. In particular, the aforementioned two designs of SDG are also individually validated to contribute critically to the suppression of implausible content and the overall gains in physical plausibility. This establishes a new and plug-and-play physics-aware paradigm for video generation. 5 authors · Sep 29, 2025
- Probing the axion-photon coupling with space-based gravitational waves detectors We propose a simple modification of space-based gravitational wave (GW) detector optical benches which would enable the measurement of vacuum birefringence of light induced by axion dark matterthrough its coupling to electromagnetism. Specifically, we propose to change a half-wave plate by a circular polarizer. While marginally affecting the sensitivity to GW by a factor 2, we show that such an adjustment would make future detectors such as LISA, TianQin, Taiji and Big-Bang Observer the most sensitive experiments at low axion masses 3 authors · Oct 23, 2024
- Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC Results are presented from searches for the standard model Higgs boson in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 and 8 TeV in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the LHC, using data samples corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 5.1 inverse femtobarns at 7 TeV and 5.3 inverse femtobarns at 8 TeV. The search is performed in five decay modes: gamma gamma, ZZ, WW, tau tau, and b b-bar. An excess of events is observed above the expected background, with a local significance of 5.0 standard deviations, at a mass near 125 GeV, signalling the production of a new particle. The expected significance for a standard model Higgs boson of that mass is 5.8 standard deviations. The excess is most significant in the two decay modes with the best mass resolution, gamma gamma and ZZ; a fit to these signals gives a mass of 125.3 +/- 0.4 (stat.) +/- 0.5 (syst.) GeV. The decay to two photons indicates that the new particle is a boson with spin different from one. 1 authors · Jul 31, 2012
- Semmeldetector: Application of Machine Learning in Commercial Bakeries The Semmeldetector, is a machine learning application that utilizes object detection models to detect, classify and count baked goods in images. Our application allows commercial bakers to track unsold baked goods, which allows them to optimize production and increase resource efficiency. We compiled a dataset comprising 1151 images that distinguishes between 18 different types of baked goods to train our detection models. To facilitate model training, we used a Copy-Paste augmentation pipeline to expand our dataset. We trained the state-of-the-art object detection model YOLOv8 on our detection task. We tested the impact of different training data, model scale, and online image augmentation pipelines on model performance. Our overall best performing model, achieved an [email protected] of 89.1% on our test set. Based on our results, we conclude that machine learning can be a valuable tool even for unforeseen industries like bakeries, even with very limited datasets. 3 authors · Jun 6, 2024
- Galaxy Spectra neural Networks (GaSNets). I. Searching for strong lens candidates in eBOSS spectra using Deep Learning With the advent of new spectroscopic surveys from ground and space, observing up to hundreds of millions of galaxies, spectra classification will become overwhelming for standard analysis techniques. To prepare for this challenge, we introduce a family of deep learning tools to classify features in one-dimensional spectra. As the first application of these Galaxy Spectra neural Networks (GaSNets), we focus on tools specialized at identifying emission lines from strongly lensed star-forming galaxies in the eBOSS spectra. We first discuss the training and testing of these networks and define a threshold probability, PL, of 95% for the high quality event detection. Then, using a previous set of spectroscopically selected strong lenses from eBOSS, confirmed with HST, we estimate a completeness of ~80% as the fraction of lenses recovered above the adopted PL. We finally apply the GaSNets to ~1.3M spectra to collect a first list of ~430 new high quality candidates identified with deep learning applied to spectroscopy and visually graded as highly probable real events. A preliminary check against ground-based observations tentatively shows that this sample has a confirmation rate of 38%, in line with previous samples selected with standard (no deep learning) classification tools and follow-up by Hubble Space Telescope. This first test shows that machine learning can be efficiently extended to feature recognition in the wavelength space, which will be crucial for future surveys like 4MOST, DESI, Euclid, and the Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST). 3 authors · Feb 16, 2022
- Solving Key Challenges in Collider Physics with Foundation Models Foundation Models are neural networks that are capable of simultaneously solving many problems. Large Language Foundation Models like ChatGPT have revolutionized many aspects of daily life, but their impact for science is not yet clear. In this paper, we use a new Foundation Model for hadronic jets to solve three key challenges in collider physics. In particular, we show how experiments can (1) save significant computing power when developing reconstruction algorithms, (2) perform a complete uncertainty quantification for high-dimensional measurements, and (3) search for new physics with model agnostic methods using low-level inputs. In each case, there are significant computational or methodological challenges with current methods that limit the science potential of deep learning algorithms. By solving each problem, we take jet Foundation Models beyond proof-of-principle studies and into the toolkit of practitioners. 2 authors · Apr 24, 2024
21 PHYSICS: Benchmarking Foundation Models on University-Level Physics Problem Solving We introduce PHYSICS, a comprehensive benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. It contains 1297 expert-annotated problems covering six core areas: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, electromagnetism, atomic physics, and optics. Each problem requires advanced physics knowledge and mathematical reasoning. We develop a robust automated evaluation system for precise and reliable validation. Our evaluation of leading foundation models reveals substantial limitations. Even the most advanced model, o3-mini, achieves only 59.9% accuracy, highlighting significant challenges in solving high-level scientific problems. Through comprehensive error analysis, exploration of diverse prompting strategies, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based knowledge augmentation, we identify key areas for improvement, laying the foundation for future advancements. 7 authors · Mar 26, 2025 2
1 PulseDL-II: A System-on-Chip Neural Network Accelerator for Timing and Energy Extraction of Nuclear Detector Signals Front-end electronics equipped with high-speed digitizers are being used and proposed for future nuclear detectors. Recent literature reveals that deep learning models, especially one-dimensional convolutional neural networks, are promising when dealing with digital signals from nuclear detectors. Simulations and experiments demonstrate the satisfactory accuracy and additional benefits of neural networks in this area. However, specific hardware accelerating such models for online operations still needs to be studied. In this work, we introduce PulseDL-II, a system-on-chip (SoC) specially designed for applications of event feature (time, energy, etc.) extraction from pulses with deep learning. Based on the previous version, PulseDL-II incorporates a RISC CPU into the system structure for better functional flexibility and integrity. The neural network accelerator in the SoC adopts a three-level (arithmetic unit, processing element, neural network) hierarchical architecture and facilitates parameter optimization of the digital design. Furthermore, we devise a quantization scheme compatible with deep learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow) within a selected subset of layer types. We validate the correct operations of PulseDL-II on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) alone and with an experimental setup comprising a direct digital synthesis (DDS) and analog-to-digital converters (ADC). The proposed system achieved 60 ps time resolution and 0.40% energy resolution at signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 47.4 dB. 6 authors · Sep 2, 2022
34 Do generative video models learn physical principles from watching videos? AI video generation is undergoing a revolution, with quality and realism advancing rapidly. These advances have led to a passionate scientific debate: Do video models learn ``world models'' that discover laws of physics -- or, alternatively, are they merely sophisticated pixel predictors that achieve visual realism without understanding the physical principles of reality? We address this question by developing Physics-IQ, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that can only be solved by acquiring a deep understanding of various physical principles, like fluid dynamics, optics, solid mechanics, magnetism and thermodynamics. We find that across a range of current models (Sora, Runway, Pika, Lumiere, Stable Video Diffusion, and VideoPoet), physical understanding is severely limited, and unrelated to visual realism. At the same time, some test cases can already be successfully solved. This indicates that acquiring certain physical principles from observation alone may be possible, but significant challenges remain. While we expect rapid advances ahead, our work demonstrates that visual realism does not imply physical understanding. Our project page is at https://physics-iq.github.io; code at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-IQ-benchmark. 5 authors · Jan 14, 2025 4
- Machine learning-driven Anomaly Detection and Forecasting for Euclid Space Telescope Operations State-of-the-art space science missions increasingly rely on automation due to spacecraft complexity and the costs of human oversight. The high volume of data, including scientific and telemetry data, makes manual inspection challenging. Machine learning offers significant potential to meet these demands. The Euclid space telescope, in its survey phase since February 2024, exemplifies this shift. Euclid's success depends on accurate monitoring and interpretation of housekeeping telemetry and science-derived data. Thousands of telemetry parameters, monitored as time series, may or may not impact the quality of scientific data. These parameters have complex interdependencies, often due to physical relationships (e.g., proximity of temperature sensors). Optimising science operations requires careful anomaly detection and identification of hidden parameter states. Moreover, understanding the interactions between known anomalies and physical quantities is crucial yet complex, as related parameters may display anomalies with varied timing and intensity. We address these challenges by analysing temperature anomalies in Euclid's telemetry from February to August 2024, focusing on eleven temperature parameters and 35 covariates. We use a predictive XGBoost model to forecast temperatures based on historical values, detecting anomalies as deviations from predictions. A second XGBoost model predicts anomalies from covariates, capturing their relationships to temperature anomalies. We identify the top three anomalies per parameter and analyse their interactions with covariates using SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations), enabling rapid, automated analysis of complex parameter relationships. Our method demonstrates how machine learning can enhance telemetry monitoring, offering scalable solutions for other missions with similar data challenges. 6 authors · Nov 8, 2024
- The Simons Observatory: Cryogenic Half Wave Plate Rotation Mechanism for the Small Aperture Telescopes We present the requirements, design and evaluation of the cryogenic continuously rotating half-wave plate (CHWP) for the Simons Observatory (SO). SO is a cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiment at Parque Astron\'{o}mico Atacama in northern Chile that covers a wide range of angular scales using both small (0.42 m) and large (6 m) aperture telescopes. In particular, the small aperture telescopes (SATs) focus on large angular scales for primordial B-mode polarization. To this end, the SATs employ a CHWP to modulate the polarization of the incident light at 8 Hz, suppressing atmospheric 1/f noise and mitigating systematic uncertainties that would otherwise arise due to the differential response of detectors sensitive to orthogonal polarizations. The CHWP consists of a 505 mm diameter achromatic sapphire HWP and a cryogenic rotation mechanism, both of which are cooled down to sim50 K to reduce detector thermal loading. Under normal operation the HWP is suspended by a superconducting magnetic bearing and rotates with a constant 2 Hz frequency, controlled by an electromagnetic synchronous motor. We find that the number of superconductors and magnets that make up the superconducting magnetic bearing are important design parameters, especially for the rotation mechanism's vibration performance. The rotation angle is detected through an angular encoder with a noise level of 0.07 muradmathrm{s}. During a cooldown, the rotor is held in place by a grip-and-release mechanism that serves as both an alignment device and a thermal path. In this paper we provide an overview of the SO SAT CHWP: its requirements, hardware design, and laboratory performance. 27 authors · Sep 26, 2023
- Solar Event Tracking with Deep Regression Networks: A Proof of Concept Evaluation With the advent of deep learning for computer vision tasks, the need for accurately labeled data in large volumes is vital for any application. The increasingly available large amounts of solar image data generated by the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) mission make this domain particularly interesting for the development and testing of deep learning systems. The currently available labeled solar data is generated by the SDO mission's Feature Finding Team's (FFT) specialized detection modules. The major drawback of these modules is that detection and labeling is performed with a cadence of every 4 to 12 hours, depending on the module. Since SDO image data products are created every 10 seconds, there is a considerable gap between labeled observations and the continuous data stream. In order to address this shortcoming, we trained a deep regression network to track the movement of two solar phenomena: Active Region and Coronal Hole events. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of solar event tracking using a deep learning approach. Since it is impossible to fully evaluate the performance of the suggested event tracks with the original data (only partial ground truth is available), we demonstrate with several metrics the effectiveness of our approach. With the purpose of generating continuously labeled solar image data, we present this feasibility analysis showing the great promise of deep regression networks for this task. 2 authors · Nov 19, 2019
4 Detection Avoidance Techniques for Large Language Models The increasing popularity of large language models has not only led to widespread use but has also brought various risks, including the potential for systematically spreading fake news. Consequently, the development of classification systems such as DetectGPT has become vital. These detectors are vulnerable to evasion techniques, as demonstrated in an experimental series: Systematic changes of the generative models' temperature proofed shallow learning-detectors to be the least reliable. Fine-tuning the generative model via reinforcement learning circumvented BERT-based-detectors. Finally, rephrasing led to a >90\% evasion of zero-shot-detectors like DetectGPT, although texts stayed highly similar to the original. A comparison with existing work highlights the better performance of the presented methods. Possible implications for society and further research are discussed. 4 authors · Mar 10, 2025 1
- Extracting the gamma-ray source-count distribution below the Fermi-LAT detection limit with deep learning We reconstruct the extra-galactic gamma-ray source-count distribution, or dN/dS, of resolved and unresolved sources by adopting machine learning techniques. Specifically, we train a convolutional neural network on synthetic 2-dimensional sky-maps, which are built by varying parameters of underlying source-counts models and incorporate the Fermi-LAT instrumental response functions. The trained neural network is then applied to the Fermi-LAT data, from which we estimate the source count distribution down to flux levels a factor of 50 below the Fermi-LAT threshold. We perform our analysis using 14 years of data collected in the (1,10) GeV energy range. The results we obtain show a source count distribution which, in the resolved regime, is in excellent agreement with the one derived from catalogued sources, and then extends as dN/dS sim S^{-2} in the unresolved regime, down to fluxes of 5 cdot 10^{-12} cm^{-2} s^{-1}. The neural network architecture and the devised methodology have the flexibility to enable future analyses to study the energy dependence of the source-count distribution. 3 authors · Feb 3, 2023
- The Tracking Machine Learning challenge : Throughput phase This paper reports on the second "Throughput" phase of the Tracking Machine Learning (TrackML) challenge on the Codalab platform. As in the first "Accuracy" phase, the participants had to solve a difficult experimental problem linked to tracking accurately the trajectory of particles as e.g. created at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): given O(10^5) points, the participants had to connect them into O(10^4) individual groups that represent the particle trajectories which are approximated helical. While in the first phase only the accuracy mattered, the goal of this second phase was a compromise between the accuracy and the speed of inference. Both were measured on the Codalab platform where the participants had to upload their software. The best three participants had solutions with good accuracy and speed an order of magnitude faster than the state of the art when the challenge was designed. Although the core algorithms were less diverse than in the first phase, a diversity of techniques have been used and are described in this paper. The performance of the algorithms are analysed in depth and lessons derived. 21 authors · May 3, 2021
- Novel |V_{cb}| extraction method via boosted bc-tagging with in-situ calibration We present a novel method for measuring |V_{cb}| at the LHC using an advanced boosted-jet tagger to identify "bc signatures". By associating boosted W rightarrow bc signals with bc-matched jets from top-quark decays, we enable an in-situ calibration of the tagger. This approach significantly suppresses backgrounds while reducing uncertainties in flavor tagging efficiencies -- key to improving measurement precision. Our study is enabled by the development of realistic, AI-based large- and small-radius taggers, Sophon and the newly introduced SophonAK4, validated to match ATLAS and CMS's state-of-the-art taggers. The method complements the conventional small radius jet approach and enables a ~30% improvement in |V_{cb}| precision under HL-LHC projections. As a byproduct, it enhances H^{pm} rightarrow bc search sensitivity by a factor of 2--5 over the recent ATLAS result based on Run 2 data. Our work offers a new perspective for the precision |V_{cb}| measurement and highlights the potential of using advanced tagging models to probe unexplored boosted regimes at the LHC. 7 authors · Feb 28, 2025
- Disentangling axion-like particle couplings to nucleons via a delayed signal in Super-Kamiokande from a future supernova In this work, we show that, if axion-like particles (ALPs) from core-collapse supernovae (SNe) couple to protons, they would produce very characteristic signatures in neutrino water Cherenkov detectors through their scattering off free protons via a , p rightarrow p , gamma interactions. Specifically, sub-MeV ALPs would generate photons with energies sim 30 MeV, which could be observed by Super-Kamiokande and Hyper-Kamiokande as a delayed signal after a future detection of SN neutrinos. We apply this to a hypothetical neighbouring SN (at a maximum distance of 100 kpc) and demonstrate that the region in the parameter space with ALP masses between 10^{-4} MeV and 1 MeV and ALP-proton couplings in the range 3 times 10^{-6}-4 times 10^{-5} could be probed. We argue that this new signature, combined with the one expected at sim 7 MeV from oxygen de-excitation, would allow us to disentangle ALP-neutron and ALP-proton couplings. 4 authors · Dec 27, 2024
- Measuring a Parity Violation Signature in the Early Universe via Ground-based Laser Interferometers We show that pairs of widely separated interferometers are advantageous for measuring the Stokes parameter V of a stochastic background of gravitational waves. This parameter characterizes asymmetry of amplitudes of right- and left-handed waves and generation of the asymmetry is closely related to parity violation in the early universe. The advantageous pairs include LIGO(Livingston)-LCGT and AIGO-Virgo that are relatively insensitive to Omega_GW (the simple intensity of the background). Using at least three detectors, information of the intensity Omega_GW and the degree of asymmetry V can be separately measured. 2 authors · Jul 4, 2007
5 MASS: Motion-Aware Spatial-Temporal Grounding for Physics Reasoning and Comprehension in Vision-Language Models Vision Language Models (VLMs) perform well on standard video tasks but struggle with physics-driven reasoning involving motion dynamics and spatial interactions. This limitation reduces their ability to interpret real or AI-generated content (AIGC) videos and to generate physically consistent content. We present an approach that addresses this gap by translating physical-world context cues into interpretable representations aligned with VLMs' perception, comprehension, and reasoning. We introduce MASS-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 4,350 real-world and AIGC videos and 8,361 free-form video question-answering pairs focused on physics-related comprehension tasks, with detailed annotations including visual detections, sub-segment grounding, and full-sequence 3D motion tracking of entities. We further present MASS, a model-agnostic method that injects spatial-temporal signals into the VLM language space via depth-based 3D encoding and visual grounding, coupled with a motion tracker for object dynamics. To strengthen cross-modal alignment and reasoning, we apply reinforcement fine-tuning. Experiments and ablations show that our refined VLMs outperform comparable and larger baselines, as well as prior state-of-the-art models, by 8.7% and 6.0%, achieving performance comparable to close-source SoTA VLMs such as Gemini-2.5-Flash on physics reasoning and comprehension. These results validate the effectiveness of our approach. University of Maryland College Park · Nov 23, 2025 2
18 PhyGDPO: Physics-Aware Groupwise Direct Preference Optimization for Physically Consistent Text-to-Video Generation Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) generation have achieved good visual quality, yet synthesizing videos that faithfully follow physical laws remains an open challenge. Existing methods mainly based on graphics or prompt extension struggle to generalize beyond simple simulated environments or learn implicit physical reasoning. The scarcity of training data with rich physics interactions and phenomena is also a problem. In this paper, we first introduce a Physics-Augmented video data construction Pipeline, PhyAugPipe, that leverages a vision-language model (VLM) with chain-of-thought reasoning to collect a large-scale training dataset, PhyVidGen-135K. Then we formulate a principled Physics-aware Groupwise Direct Preference Optimization, PhyGDPO, framework that builds upon the groupwise Plackett-Luce probabilistic model to capture holistic preferences beyond pairwise comparisons. In PhyGDPO, we design a Physics-Guided Rewarding (PGR) scheme that embeds VLM-based physics rewards to steer optimization toward physical consistency. We also propose a LoRA-Switch Reference (LoRA-SR) scheme that eliminates memory-heavy reference duplication for efficient training. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art open-source methods on PhyGenBench and VideoPhy2. Please check our project page at https://caiyuanhao1998.github.io/project/PhyGDPO for more video results. Our code, models, and data will be released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Open-PhyGDPO AI at Meta · Dec 30, 2025 4
- A Neural Network-Based Search for Unmodeled Transients in LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's Third Observing Run This paper presents the results of a Neural Network (NN)-based search for short-duration gravitational-wave transients in data from the third observing run of LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. The search targets unmodeled transients with durations of milliseconds to a few seconds in the 30-1500 Hz frequency band, without assumptions about the incoming signal direction, polarization, or morphology. Using the Gravitational Wave Anomalous Knowledge (GWAK) method, three compact binary coalescences (CBCs) identified by existing pipelines are successfully detected, along with a range of detector glitches. The algorithm constructs a low-dimensional embedded space to capture the physical features of signals, enabling the detection of CBCs, detector glitches, and unmodeled transients. This study demonstrates GWAK's ability to enhance gravitational-wave searches beyond the limits of existing pipelines, laying the groundwork for future detection strategies. 16 authors · Dec 27, 2024
- Cosmic Multipoles in Galaxy Surveys Part I: How Inferences Depend on Source Counts and Masks We present a new approach to constructing and fitting dipoles and higher-order multipoles in synthetic galaxy samples over the sky. Within our Bayesian paradigm, we illustrate that this technique is robust to masked skies, allowing us to make credible inferences about the relative contributions of each multipole. We also show that dipoles can be recovered in surveys with small footprints, determining the requisite source counts required for concrete estimation of the dipole parameters. This work is motivated by recent probes of the cosmic dipole in galaxy catalogues. Namely, the kinematic dipole of the Cosmic Microwave Background, as arising from the motion of our heliocentric frame at approx 370 km,s^{-1}, implies that an analogous dipole should be observed in the number counts of galaxies in flux-density-limited samples. Recent studies have reported a dipole aligning with the kinematic dipole but with an anomalously large amplitude. Accordingly, our new technique will be important as forthcoming galaxy surveys are made available and for revisiting previous data. 3 authors · Dec 17, 2024
- Semi-Truths: A Large-Scale Dataset of AI-Augmented Images for Evaluating Robustness of AI-Generated Image detectors Text-to-image diffusion models have impactful applications in art, design, and entertainment, yet these technologies also pose significant risks by enabling the creation and dissemination of misinformation. Although recent advancements have produced AI-generated image detectors that claim robustness against various augmentations, their true effectiveness remains uncertain. Do these detectors reliably identify images with different levels of augmentation? Are they biased toward specific scenes or data distributions? To investigate, we introduce SEMI-TRUTHS, featuring 27,600 real images, 223,400 masks, and 1,472,700 AI-augmented images that feature targeted and localized perturbations produced using diverse augmentation techniques, diffusion models, and data distributions. Each augmented image is accompanied by metadata for standardized and targeted evaluation of detector robustness. Our findings suggest that state-of-the-art detectors exhibit varying sensitivities to the types and degrees of perturbations, data distributions, and augmentation methods used, offering new insights into their performance and limitations. The code for the augmentation and evaluation pipeline is available at https://github.com/J-Kruk/SemiTruths. 7 authors · Nov 11, 2024
- Enhancing the Sensitivity for Triple Higgs Boson Searches with Deep Learning Techniques Using two benchmark models containing extended scalar sectors beyond the Standard Model, we study deep learning techniques to enhance the sensitivity of resonant triple Higgs boson searches in the fully hadronic 6b channel, which suffers from the combinatorial challenge of reconstructing the Higgs bosons correctly from the multiple b-jets. More specifically, we employ the framework of Symmetry Preserving Attention Network (Spa-Net), which takes into account the permutational symmetry when a correct pairing of b-jets is achieved, to tackle both jet pairing and event classification. Significantly improved efficiency is achieved in signal and background discrimination. When comparing with the conventional Dense Neural Networks, Spa-Net results in up to 40\% more stringent limits on resonant production cross-sections. These results highlight the potential of using advanced machine learning techniques to significantly improve the sensitivity of triple Higgs boson searches in the fully hadronic channel. 5 authors · Oct 2, 2025
- Calculation of prompt diphoton production cross sections at Tevatron and LHC energies A fully differential calculation in perturbative quantum chromodynamics is presented for the production of massive photon pairs at hadron colliders. All next-to-leading order perturbative contributions from quark-antiquark, gluon-(anti)quark, and gluon-gluon subprocesses are included, as well as all-orders resummation of initial-state gluon radiation valid at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. The region of phase space is specified in which the calculation is most reliable. Good agreement is demonstrated with data from the Fermilab Tevatron, and predictions are made for more detailed tests with CDF and DO data. Predictions are shown for distributions of diphoton pairs produced at the energy of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Distributions of the diphoton pairs from the decay of a Higgs boson are contrasted with those produced from QCD processes at the LHC, showing that enhanced sensitivity to the signal can be obtained with judicious selection of events. 4 authors · Apr 2, 2007
- An improved infrastructure for the IceCube realtime system The IceCube realtime alert system has been operating since 2016. It provides prompt alerts on high-energy neutrino events to the astroparticle physics community. The localization regions for the incoming direction of neutrinos are published through NASA's Gamma-ray Coordinate Network (GCN). The IceCube realtime system consists of infrastructure dedicated to the selection of alert events, the reconstruction of their topology and arrival direction, the calculation of directional uncertainty contours and the distribution of the event information through public alert networks. Using a message-based workflow management system, a dedicated software (SkyDriver) provides a representational state transfer (REST) interface to parallelized reconstruction algorithms. In this contribution, we outline the improvements of the internal infrastructure of the IceCube realtime system that aims to streamline the internal handling of neutrino events, their distribution to the SkyDriver interface, the collection of the reconstruction results as well as their conversion into human- and machine-readable alerts to be publicly distributed through different alert networks. An approach for the long-term storage and cataloging of alert events according to findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR) principles is outlined. 5 authors · Aug 2, 2023
- Probing a diffuse flux of axion-like particles from galactic supernovae with neutrino water Cherenkov detectors In this article, we claim that axion-like particles (ALPs) with MeV masses can be produced with semi-relativistic velocities in core-collapse supernovae (SNe), generating a diffuse galactic flux. We show that these ALPs can be detected in neutrino water Cherenkov detectors via a , p rightarrow p , gamma interactions. Using Super-Kamiokande data, we derive new constraints on the ALP parameter space, excluding a region spanning more than one order of magnitude in the ALP-proton coupling above cooling bounds for ALP masses in the range of 1-80 MeV and ALP-proton couplings between 6times10^{-6}-2times10^{-4}. We show that the future Hyper-Kamiokande will be able to probe couplings as small as 2times10^{-6}, fully closing the allowed region above SN 1987A cooling bounds. 4 authors · Dec 12, 2024
1 Ultra Fast Transformers on FPGAs for Particle Physics Experiments This work introduces a highly efficient implementation of the transformer architecture on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) by using the hls4ml tool. Given the demonstrated effectiveness of transformer models in addressing a wide range of problems, their application in experimental triggers within particle physics becomes a subject of significant interest. In this work, we have implemented critical components of a transformer model, such as multi-head attention and softmax layers. To evaluate the effectiveness of our implementation, we have focused on a particle physics jet flavor tagging problem, employing a public dataset. We recorded latency under 2 mus on the Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA, which is compatible with hardware trigger requirements at the CERN Large Hadron Collider experiments. 9 authors · Feb 1, 2024
10 Scaling Up Diffusion and Flow-based XGBoost Models Novel machine learning methods for tabular data generation are often developed on small datasets which do not match the scale required for scientific applications. We investigate a recent proposal to use XGBoost as the function approximator in diffusion and flow-matching models on tabular data, which proved to be extremely memory intensive, even on tiny datasets. In this work, we conduct a critical analysis of the existing implementation from an engineering perspective, and show that these limitations are not fundamental to the method; with better implementation it can be scaled to datasets 370x larger than previously used. Our efficient implementation also unlocks scaling models to much larger sizes which we show directly leads to improved performance on benchmark tasks. We also propose algorithmic improvements that can further benefit resource usage and model performance, including multi-output trees which are well-suited to generative modeling. Finally, we present results on large-scale scientific datasets derived from experimental particle physics as part of the Fast Calorimeter Simulation Challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/calo-forest. 2 authors · Aug 28, 2024 2
- TIDMAD: Time Series Dataset for Discovering Dark Matter with AI Denoising Dark matter makes up approximately 85% of total matter in our universe, yet it has never been directly observed in any laboratory on Earth. The origin of dark matter is one of the most important questions in contemporary physics, and a convincing detection of dark matter would be a Nobel-Prize-level breakthrough in fundamental science. The ABRACADABRA experiment was specifically designed to search for dark matter. Although it has not yet made a discovery, ABRACADABRA has produced several dark matter search results widely endorsed by the physics community. The experiment generates ultra-long time-series data at a rate of 10 million samples per second, where the dark matter signal would manifest itself as a sinusoidal oscillation mode within the ultra-long time series. In this paper, we present the TIDMAD -- a comprehensive data release from the ABRACADABRA experiment including three key components: an ultra-long time series dataset divided into training, validation, and science subsets; a carefully-designed denoising score for direct model benchmarking; and a complete analysis framework which produces a community-standard dark matter search result suitable for publication as a physics paper. This data release enables core AI algorithms to extract the signal and produce real physics results thereby advancing fundamental science. The data downloading and associated analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/jessicafry/TIDMAD 6 authors · Jun 5, 2024 1
2 PhysicsEval: Inference-Time Techniques to Improve the Reasoning Proficiency of Large Language Models on Physics Problems The discipline of physics stands as a cornerstone of human intellect, driving the evolution of technology and deepening our understanding of the fundamental principles of the cosmos. Contemporary literature includes some works centered on the task of solving physics problems - a crucial domain of natural language reasoning. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of frontier LLMs in solving physics problems, both mathematical and descriptive. We also employ a plethora of inference-time techniques and agentic frameworks to improve the performance of the models. This includes the verification of proposed solutions in a cumulative fashion by other, smaller LLM agents, and we perform a comparative analysis of the performance that the techniques entail. There are significant improvements when the multi-agent framework is applied to problems that the models initially perform poorly on. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation benchmark for physics problems, {rm P{small HYSICS}E{small VAL}}, consisting of 19,609 problems sourced from various physics textbooks and their corresponding correct solutions scraped from physics forums and educational websites. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/areebuzair/PhysicsEval. 6 authors · Jul 31, 2025
- Visualizing Sound Directivity via Smartphone Sensors We present a fast, simple method for automated data acquisition and visualization of sound directivity, made convenient and accessible via a smartphone app, "Polar Pattern Plotter." The app synchronizes measurements of sound volume with the phone's angular orientation obtained from either compass, gyroscope or accelerometer sensors and produces a graph and exportable data file. It is generalizable to various sound sources and receivers via the use of an input-jack-adaptor to supplant the smartphone's (omnidirectional) microphone. Results provide both a visual and quantitative representation of sound fields and device responses, adequate for introductory physics experiments. 2 authors · Feb 20, 2017
- The Machine Learning Landscape of Top Taggers Based on the established task of identifying boosted, hadronically decaying top quarks, we compare a wide range of modern machine learning approaches. Unlike most established methods they rely on low-level input, for instance calorimeter output. While their network architectures are vastly different, their performance is comparatively similar. In general, we find that these new approaches are extremely powerful and great fun. 27 authors · Feb 26, 2019
- Finetuning Foundation Models for Joint Analysis Optimization In this work we demonstrate that significant gains in performance and data efficiency can be achieved in High Energy Physics (HEP) by moving beyond the standard paradigm of sequential optimization or reconstruction and analysis components. We conceptually connect HEP reconstruction and analysis to modern machine learning workflows such as pretraining, finetuning, domain adaptation and high-dimensional embedding spaces and quantify the gains in the example usecase of searches of heavy resonances decaying via an intermediate di-Higgs system to four b-jets. 3 authors · Jan 24, 2024
- Learning Symmetry-Independent Jet Representations via Jet-Based Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture In high energy physics, self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have the potential to aid in the creation of machine learning models without the need for labeled datasets for a variety of tasks, including those related to jets -- narrow sprays of particles produced by quarks and gluons in high energy particle collisions. This study introduces an approach to learning jet representations without hand-crafted augmentations using a jet-based joint embedding predictive architecture (J-JEPA), which aims to predict various physical targets from an informative context. As our method does not require hand-crafted augmentation like other common SSL techniques, J-JEPA avoids introducing biases that could harm downstream tasks. Since different tasks generally require invariance under different augmentations, this training without hand-crafted augmentation enables versatile applications, offering a pathway toward a cross-task foundation model. We finetune the representations learned by J-JEPA for jet tagging and benchmark them against task-specific representations. 6 authors · Dec 5, 2024
- Masked Particle Modeling on Sets: Towards Self-Supervised High Energy Physics Foundation Models We propose masked particle modeling (MPM) as a self-supervised method for learning generic, transferable, and reusable representations on unordered sets of inputs for use in high energy physics (HEP) scientific data. This work provides a novel scheme to perform masked modeling based pre-training to learn permutation invariant functions on sets. More generally, this work provides a step towards building large foundation models for HEP that can be generically pre-trained with self-supervised learning and later fine-tuned for a variety of down-stream tasks. In MPM, particles in a set are masked and the training objective is to recover their identity, as defined by a discretized token representation of a pre-trained vector quantized variational autoencoder. We study the efficacy of the method in samples of high energy jets at collider physics experiments, including studies on the impact of discretization, permutation invariance, and ordering. We also study the fine-tuning capability of the model, showing that it can be adapted to tasks such as supervised and weakly supervised jet classification, and that the model can transfer efficiently with small fine-tuning data sets to new classes and new data domains. 7 authors · Jan 24, 2024
- Adaptive Detection of Fast Moving Celestial Objects Using a Mixture of Experts and Physical-Inspired Neural Network Fast moving celestial objects are characterized by velocities across the celestial sphere that significantly differ from the motions of background stars. In observational images, these objects exhibit distinct shapes, contrasting with the typical appearances of stars. Depending on the observational method employed, these celestial entities may be designated as near-Earth objects or asteroids. Historically, fast moving celestial objects have been observed using ground-based telescopes, where the relative stability of stars and Earth facilitated effective image differencing techniques alongside traditional fast moving celestial object detection and classification algorithms. However, the growing prevalence of space-based telescopes, along with their diverse observational modes, produces images with different properties, rendering conventional methods less effective. This paper presents a novel algorithm for detecting fast moving celestial objects within star fields. Our approach enhances state-of-the-art fast moving celestial object detection neural networks by transforming them into physical-inspired neural networks. These neural networks leverage the point spread function of the telescope and the specific observational mode as prior information; they can directly identify moving fast moving celestial objects within star fields without requiring additional training, thereby addressing the limitations of traditional techniques. Additionally, all neural networks are integrated using the mixture of experts technique, forming a comprehensive fast moving celestial object detection algorithm. We have evaluated our algorithm using simulated observational data that mimics various observations carried out by space based telescope scenarios and real observation images. Results demonstrate that our method effectively detects fast moving celestial objects across different observational modes. 5 authors · Apr 10, 2025
- Particle Transformer for Jet Tagging Jet tagging is a critical yet challenging classification task in particle physics. While deep learning has transformed jet tagging and significantly improved performance, the lack of a large-scale public dataset impedes further enhancement. In this work, we present JetClass, a new comprehensive dataset for jet tagging. The JetClass dataset consists of 100 M jets, about two orders of magnitude larger than existing public datasets. A total of 10 types of jets are simulated, including several types unexplored for tagging so far. Based on the large dataset, we propose a new Transformer-based architecture for jet tagging, called Particle Transformer (ParT). By incorporating pairwise particle interactions in the attention mechanism, ParT achieves higher tagging performance than a plain Transformer and surpasses the previous state-of-the-art, ParticleNet, by a large margin. The pre-trained ParT models, once fine-tuned, also substantially enhance the performance on two widely adopted jet tagging benchmarks. The dataset, code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/jet-universe/particle_transformer. 3 authors · Feb 8, 2022
- Advanced LIGO The Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detectors are second generation instruments designed and built for the two LIGO observatories in Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA. The two instruments are identical in design, and are specialized versions of a Michelson interferometer with 4 km long arms. As in initial LIGO, Fabry-Perot cavities are used in the arms to increase the interaction time with a gravitational wave, and power recycling is used to increase the effective laser power. Signal recycling has been added in Advanced LIGO to improve the frequency response. In the most sensitive frequency region around 100 Hz, the design strain sensitivity is a factor of 10 better than initial LIGO. In addition, the low frequency end of the sensitivity band is moved from 40 Hz down to 10 Hz. All interferometer components have been replaced with improved technologies to achieve this sensitivity gain. Much better seismic isolation and test mass suspensions are responsible for the gains at lower frequencies. Higher laser power, larger test masses and improved mirror coatings lead to the improved sensitivity at mid- and high- frequencies. Data collecting runs with these new instruments are planned to begin in mid-2015. 1 authors · Nov 17, 2014
- Particle production during inflation and gravitational waves detectable by ground-based interferometers Inflation typically predicts a quasi scale-invariant spectrum of gravitational waves. In models of slow-roll inflation, the amplitude of such a background is too small to allow direct detection without a dedicated space-based experiment such as the proposed BBO or DECIGO. In this paper we note that particle production during inflation can generate a feature in the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves. We discuss the possibility that such a feature might be detected by ground-based laser interferometers such as Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, which will become operational in the next few years. We also discuss the prospects of detection by a space interferometer like LISA. We first study gravitational waves induced by nonperturbative, explosive particle production during inflation: while explosive production of scalar quanta does not generate a significant bump in the primordial tensor spectrum, production of vectors can. We also show that chiral gravitational waves produced by electromagnetic fields amplified by an axion-like inflaton could be detectable by Advanced LIGO. 2 authors · Aug 31, 2011
- Real-Time Drone Detection and Tracking With Visible, Thermal and Acoustic Sensors This paper explores the process of designing an automatic multi-sensor drone detection system. Besides the common video and audio sensors, the system also includes a thermal infrared camera, which is shown to be a feasible solution to the drone detection task. Even with slightly lower resolution, the performance is just as good as a camera in visible range. The detector performance as a function of the sensor-to-target distance is also investigated. In addition, using sensor fusion, the system is made more robust than the individual sensors, helping to reduce false detections. To counteract the lack of public datasets, a novel video dataset containing 650 annotated infrared and visible videos of drones, birds, airplanes and helicopters is also presented (https://github.com/DroneDetectionThesis/Drone-detection-dataset). The database is complemented with an audio dataset of the classes drones, helicopters and background noise. 3 authors · Jul 14, 2020
- DA 362: A Gamma-ray Emitting Compact Symmetric Object The Gamma-ray detection from an astrophysical object indicates the presence of an extreme environment where high-energy radiation is produced. With the continuous monitoring of the Gamma-ray sky by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), leading to deeper sensitivity, the high-energy Gamma-ray emission has now been detected from a diverse class of jetted active galactic nuclei (AGN). Here, we present the results of a multiwavelength study of the radio source DA~362, which was reported to be a blazar candidate of uncertain type. However, it was recently identified as a bona fide compact symmetric object (CSO) based on its sub-kpc, bi-polar radio morphology, and lack of radio variability. This makes DA~362 the only fourth Gamma-ray emitting object of this enigmatic class of radio-loud AGN. Using five very long baseline interferometry observations covering 1996-2018, we found the jet separation velocity to be subluminal (v_{rm app}sim 0.2c), thus supporting its CSO nature. Its Fermi-LAT observations revealed a Gamma-ray flaring activity, a phenomenon never detected from the other three Gamma-ray detected CSOs. This object is bright in the near-infrared band but extremely faint in the optical-ultraviolet filters, hinting at possible obscuration. The Swift X-Ray Telescope observation of DA 362 reveals an extremely hard X-ray spectrum, though a strong claim cannot be made due to large uncertainties. We conclude that deeper observations are needed to probe the broadband properties of this enigmatic object and to understand the origin of high-energy Gamma-ray emission. 4 authors · Dec 17, 2024
- FemtoDet: An Object Detection Baseline for Energy Versus Performance Tradeoffs Efficient detectors for edge devices are often optimized for parameters or speed count metrics, which remain in weak correlation with the energy of detectors. However, some vision applications of convolutional neural networks, such as always-on surveillance cameras, are critical for energy constraints. This paper aims to serve as a baseline by designing detectors to reach tradeoffs between energy and performance from two perspectives: 1) We extensively analyze various CNNs to identify low-energy architectures, including selecting activation functions, convolutions operators, and feature fusion structures on necks. These underappreciated details in past work seriously affect the energy consumption of detectors; 2) To break through the dilemmatic energy-performance problem, we propose a balanced detector driven by energy using discovered low-energy components named FemtoDet. In addition to the novel construction, we improve FemtoDet by considering convolutions and training strategy optimizations. Specifically, we develop a new instance boundary enhancement (IBE) module for convolution optimization to overcome the contradiction between the limited capacity of CNNs and detection tasks in diverse spatial representations, and propose a recursive warm-restart (RecWR) for optimizing training strategy to escape the sub-optimization of light-weight detectors by considering the data shift produced in popular augmentations. As a result, FemtoDet with only 68.77k parameters achieves a competitive score of 46.3 AP50 on PASCAL VOC and 1.11 W & 64.47 FPS on Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 CPU platforms. Extensive experiments on COCO and TJU-DHD datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves competitive results in diverse scenes. 6 authors · Jan 17, 2023
- Sensitivity of BEACON to Ultra-High Energy Diffuse and Transient Neutrinos Ultra-high energy neutrinos (E>10^{17} eV) can provide insight into the most powerful accelerators in the universe, however their flux is extremely low. The Beamforming Elevated Array for COsmic Neutrinos (BEACON) is a detector concept which efficiently achieves sensitivity to this flux by employing phased radio arrays on mountains, which search for the radio emission of up-going extensive air showers created by Earth-skimming tau neutrinos. Here, we calculate the point-source effective area of BEACON and characterize its sensitivity to transient neutrino fluences with both short (<15 min) and long (> 1 day) durations. Additionally, by integrating the effective area, we provide an updated estimate of the diffuse flux sensitivity. With just 100 stations, BEACON achieves sensitivity to short-duration transients such as nearby short gamma-ray bursts. With 1000 stations, BEACON achieves a sensitivity to long-duration transients, as well as the cosmogenic flux, ten times greater than existing experiments at 1 EeV. With an efficient design optimized for ultrahigh energy neutrinos, BEACON is capable of discovering the sources of neutrinos at the highest energies. 19 authors · Apr 17, 2025
- SoDaCam: Software-defined Cameras via Single-Photon Imaging Reinterpretable cameras are defined by their post-processing capabilities that exceed traditional imaging. We present "SoDaCam" that provides reinterpretable cameras at the granularity of photons, from photon-cubes acquired by single-photon devices. Photon-cubes represent the spatio-temporal detections of photons as a sequence of binary frames, at frame-rates as high as 100 kHz. We show that simple transformations of the photon-cube, or photon-cube projections, provide the functionality of numerous imaging systems including: exposure bracketing, flutter shutter cameras, video compressive systems, event cameras, and even cameras that move during exposure. Our photon-cube projections offer the flexibility of being software-defined constructs that are only limited by what is computable, and shot-noise. We exploit this flexibility to provide new capabilities for the emulated cameras. As an added benefit, our projections provide camera-dependent compression of photon-cubes, which we demonstrate using an implementation of our projections on a novel compute architecture that is designed for single-photon imaging. 6 authors · Aug 31, 2023
2 Augmented Physics: Creating Interactive and Embedded Physics Simulations from Static Textbook Diagrams We introduce Augmented Physics, a machine learning-integrated authoring tool designed for creating embedded interactive physics simulations from static textbook diagrams. Leveraging recent advancements in computer vision, such as Segment Anything and Multi-modal LLMs, our web-based system enables users to semi-automatically extract diagrams from physics textbooks and generate interactive simulations based on the extracted content. These interactive diagrams are seamlessly integrated into scanned textbook pages, facilitating interactive and personalized learning experiences across various physics concepts, such as optics, circuits, and kinematics. Drawing from an elicitation study with seven physics instructors, we explore four key augmentation strategies: 1) augmented experiments, 2) animated diagrams, 3) bi-directional binding, and 4) parameter visualization. We evaluate our system through technical evaluation, a usability study (N=12), and expert interviews (N=12). Study findings suggest that our system can facilitate more engaging and personalized learning experiences in physics education. 6 authors · May 28, 2024
- A Heavy-Metal Scenario of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays The mass composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is an open problem in astroparticle physics. It is usually inferred from the depth of the shower maximum (Xmax) of cosmic-ray showers, which is only ambiguously determined by modern hadronic interaction models. We examine a data-driven scenario, in which we consider the expectation value of Xmax as a free parameter. We test the novel hypothesis whether the cosmic-ray data from the Pierre Auger Observatory can be interpreted in a consistent picture, under the assumption that the mass composition of cosmic rays at the highest energies is dominated by high metallicity, resulting in pure iron nuclei at energies above ~40 EeV. We investigate the implications on astrophysical observations and hadronic interactions, and we discuss the global consistency of the data assuming this heavy-metal scenario. We conclude that the data from the Pierre Auger Observatory can be interpreted consistently if the expectation values for Xmax from modern hadronic interaction models are shifted to larger values. 5 authors · Apr 16, 2025
- The Virtual Quantum Optics Laboratory We present a web-based software tool, the Virtual Quantum Optics Laboratory (VQOL), that may be used for designing and executing realistic simulations of quantum optics experiments. A graphical user interface allows one to rapidly build and configure a variety of different optical experiments, while the runtime environment provides unique capabilities for visualization and analysis. All standard linear optical components are available as well as sources of thermal, coherent, and entangled Gaussian states. A unique aspect of VQOL is the introduction of non-Gaussian measurements using detectors modeled as deterministic devices that "click" when the amplitude of the light falls above a given threshold. We describe the underlying theoretical models and provide several illustrative examples. We find that VQOL provides a a faithful representation of many experimental quantum optics phenomena and may serve as both a useful instructional tool for students as well as a valuable research tool for practitioners. 5 authors · May 15, 2021
6 Mimicking the Physicist's Eye:A VLM-centric Approach for Physics Formula Discovery Automated discovery of physical laws from observational data in the real world is a grand challenge in AI. Current methods, relying on symbolic regression or LLMs, are limited to uni-modal data and overlook the rich, visual phenomenological representations of motion that are indispensable to physicists. This "sensory deprivation" severely weakens their ability to interpret the inherent spatio-temporal patterns within dynamic phenomena. To address this gap, we propose VIPER-R1, a multimodal model that performs Visual Induction for Physics-based Equation Reasoning to discover fundamental symbolic formulas. It integrates visual perception, trajectory data, and symbolic reasoning to emulate the scientific discovery process. The model is trained via a curriculum of Motion Structure Induction (MSI), using supervised fine-tuning to interpret kinematic phase portraits and to construct hypotheses guided by a Causal Chain of Thought (C-CoT), followed by Reward-Guided Symbolic Calibration (RGSC) to refine the formula structure with reinforcement learning. During inference, the trained VIPER-R1 acts as an agent: it first posits a high-confidence symbolic ansatz, then proactively invokes an external symbolic regression tool to perform Symbolic Residual Realignment (SR^2). This final step, analogous to a physicist's perturbation analysis, reconciles the theoretical model with empirical data. To support this research, we introduce PhysSymbol, a new 5,000-instance multimodal corpus. Experiments show that VIPER-R1 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art VLM baselines in accuracy and interpretability, enabling more precise discovery of physical laws. Project page: https://jiaaqiliu.github.io/VIPER-R1/ 15 authors · Aug 24, 2025 2
3 WISA: World Simulator Assistant for Physics-Aware Text-to-Video Generation Recent rapid advancements in text-to-video (T2V) generation, such as SoRA and Kling, have shown great potential for building world simulators. However, current T2V models struggle to grasp abstract physical principles and generate videos that adhere to physical laws. This challenge arises primarily from a lack of clear guidance on physical information due to a significant gap between abstract physical principles and generation models. To this end, we introduce the World Simulator Assistant (WISA), an effective framework for decomposing and incorporating physical principles into T2V models. Specifically, WISA decomposes physical principles into textual physical descriptions, qualitative physical categories, and quantitative physical properties. To effectively embed these physical attributes into the generation process, WISA incorporates several key designs, including Mixture-of-Physical-Experts Attention (MoPA) and a Physical Classifier, enhancing the model's physics awareness. Furthermore, most existing datasets feature videos where physical phenomena are either weakly represented or entangled with multiple co-occurring processes, limiting their suitability as dedicated resources for learning explicit physical principles. We propose a novel video dataset, WISA-32K, collected based on qualitative physical categories. It consists of 32,000 videos, representing 17 physical laws across three domains of physics: dynamics, thermodynamics, and optics. Experimental results demonstrate that WISA can effectively enhance the compatibility of T2V models with real-world physical laws, achieving a considerable improvement on the VideoPhy benchmark. The visual exhibitions of WISA and WISA-32K are available in the https://360cvgroup.github.io/WISA/. 12 authors · Mar 11, 2025 2
1 Prompt emission of relativistic protons up to GeV energies from M6.4-class solar flare on July 17, 2023 We show evidence of particle acceleration at GEV energies associated directly with protons from the prompt emission of a long-duration M6-class solar flare on July 17, 2023, rather than from protons acceleration by shocks from its associated Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), which erupted with a speed of 1342 km/s. Solar Energetic Particles (SEP) accelerated by the blast have reached Earth, up to an almost S3 (strong) category of a radiation storm on the NOAA scale. Also, we show a temporal correlation between the fast rising of GOES-16 proton and muon excess at ground level in the count rate of the New-Tupi muon detector at the central SAA region. A Monte Carlo spectral analysis based on muon excess at New-Tupi is consistent with the acceleration of electrons and protons (ions) up to relativistic energies (GeV energy range) in the impulsive phase of the flare. In addition, we present another two marginal particle excesses (with low confidence) at ground-level detectors in correlation with the solar flare prompt emission. 3 authors · Nov 28, 2023
- Extension of the J-PARC Hadron Experimental Facility: Third White Paper The J-PARC Hadron Experimental Facility was constructed with an aim to explore the origin and evolution of matter in the universe through the experiments with intense particle beams. In the past decade, many results on particle and nuclear physics have been obtained at the present facility. To expand the physics programs to unexplored regions never achieved, the extension project of the Hadron Experimental Facility has been extensively discussed. This white paper presents the physics of the extension of the Hadron Experimental Facility for resolving the issues in the fields of the strangeness nuclear physics, hadron physics, and flavor physics. 43 authors · Oct 9, 2021
- Interpretation of excess in H to Z γ using a light axion-like particle We interpret the recent excess in a rare decay of the Higgs boson, Hto Zgamma, using a light axion-like particle (ALP) in the massrange 0.05 - 0.1 GeV.The dominant decay of such a light ALP is into a pair of collimated photons, whose decay is required to happen before reaching the ECAL detector, such that it mimics a single photon in the detector. It can explain the excess with a coupling C^{rm eff}_{aZH} / Lambda sim 4 times 10^{-5};{rm GeV}^{-1}, while the decay of the ALP before reaching the ECAL requires the diphoton coupling C^{rm eff}_{gammagamma}/ Lambda ge 0.35 ,{rm TeV}^{-1} (0.1,{rm eV}/m_a)^2. A potential test would be the rare decay of the Z boson Z to a H^* to a (b bar b) at the Tera-Z option of the future FCC and CEPC. However, it has a branching ratio of only O(10^{-12}), and thus barely testable. The production cross section for pp to Z^* to a H via the same coupling C^{rm eff}_{aZH} / Lambda at the LHC is too small for detection. 2 authors · Feb 8, 2024
- Addendum to Research MMMCV; A Man/Microbio/Megabio/Computer Vision In October 2007, a Research Proposal for the University of Sydney, Australia, the author suggested that biovie-physical phenomenon as `electrodynamic dependant biological vision', is governed by relativistic quantum laws and biovision. The phenomenon on the basis of `biovielectroluminescence', satisfies man/microbio/megabio/computer vision (MMMCV), as a robust candidate for physical and visual sciences. The general aim of this addendum is to present a refined text of Sections 1-3 of that proposal and highlighting the contents of its Appendix in form of a `Mechanisms' Section. We then briefly remind in an article aimed for December 2007, by appending two more equations into Section 3, a theoretical II-time scenario as a time model well-proposed for the phenomenon. The time model within the core of the proposal, plays a significant role in emphasizing the principle points on Objectives no. 1-8, Sub-hypothesis 3.1.2, mentioned in Article [arXiv:0710.0410]. It also expresses the time concept in terms of causing quantized energy f(|E|) of time |t|, emit in regard to shortening the probability of particle loci as predictable patterns of particle's un-occurred motion, a solution to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (HUP) into a simplistic manner. We conclude that, practical frames via a time algorithm to this model, fixates such predictable patterns of motion of scenery bodies onto recordable observation points of a MMMCV system. It even suppresses/predicts superposition phenomena coming from a human subject and/or other bio-subjects for any decision making event, e.g., brainwave quantum patterns based on vision. Maintaining the existential probability of Riemann surfaces of II-time scenarios in the context of biovielectroluminescence, makes motion-prediction a possibility. 1 authors · Nov 6, 2007
- Measurement of Charm Production Cross Sections in e+e- Annihilation at Energies between 3.97 and 4.26 GeV Using the CLEO-c detector at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, we have measured inclusive and exclusive cross sections for the production of D+, D0 and Ds+ mesons in e+e- annihilations at thirteen center-of-mass energies between 3.97 and 4.26 GeV. Exclusive cross sections are presented for final states consisting of two charm mesons (DD, D*D, D*D*, Ds+Ds-, Ds*+Ds-, and Ds*+Ds*-) and for processes in which the charm-meson pair is accompanied by a pion. No enhancement in any final state is observed at the energy of the Y(4260). 2 authors · Jan 22, 2008
- Synthetic Vision: Training Vision-Language Models to Understand Physics Physical reasoning, which involves the interpretation, understanding, and prediction of object behavior in dynamic environments, remains a significant challenge for current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In this work, we propose two methods to enhance VLMs' physical reasoning capabilities using simulated data. First, we fine-tune a pre-trained VLM using question-answer (QA) pairs generated from simulations relevant to physical reasoning tasks. Second, we introduce Physics Context Builders (PCBs), specialized VLMs fine-tuned to create scene descriptions enriched with physical properties and processes. During physical reasoning tasks, these PCBs can be leveraged as context to assist a Large Language Model (LLM) to improve its performance. We evaluate both of our approaches using multiple benchmarks, including a new stability detection QA dataset called Falling Tower, which includes both simulated and real-world scenes, and CLEVRER. We demonstrate that a small QA fine-tuned VLM can significantly outperform larger state-of-the-art foundational models. We also show that integrating PCBs boosts the performance of foundational LLMs on physical reasoning tasks. Using the real-world scenes from the Falling Tower dataset, we also validate the robustness of both approaches in Sim2Real transfer. Our results highlight the utility that simulated data can have in the creation of learning systems capable of advanced physical reasoning. 5 authors · Dec 11, 2024
1 Building astroBERT, a language model for Astronomy & Astrophysics The existing search tools for exploring the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) can be quite rich and empowering (e.g., similar and trending operators), but researchers are not yet allowed to fully leverage semantic search. For example, a query for "results from the Planck mission" should be able to distinguish between all the various meanings of Planck (person, mission, constant, institutions and more) without further clarification from the user. At ADS, we are applying modern machine learning and natural language processing techniques to our dataset of recent astronomy publications to train astroBERT, a deeply contextual language model based on research at Google. Using astroBERT, we aim to enrich the ADS dataset and improve its discoverability, and in particular we are developing our own named entity recognition tool. We present here our preliminary results and lessons learned. 17 authors · Dec 1, 2021
- Point cloud-based diffusion models for the Electron-Ion Collider At high-energy collider experiments, generative models can be used for a wide range of tasks, including fast detector simulations, unfolding, searches of physics beyond the Standard Model, and inference tasks. In particular, it has been demonstrated that score-based diffusion models can generate high-fidelity and accurate samples of jets or collider events. This work expands on previous generative models in three distinct ways. First, our model is trained to generate entire collider events, including all particle species with complete kinematic information. We quantify how well the model learns event-wide constraints such as the conservation of momentum and discrete quantum numbers. We focus on the events at the future Electron-Ion Collider, but we expect that our results can be extended to proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions. Second, previous generative models often relied on image-based techniques. The sparsity of the data can negatively affect the fidelity and sampling time of the model. We address these issues using point clouds and a novel architecture combining edge creation with transformer modules called Point Edge Transformers. Third, we adapt the foundation model OmniLearn, to generate full collider events. This approach may indicate a transition toward adapting and fine-tuning foundation models for downstream tasks instead of training new models from scratch. 6 authors · Oct 29, 2024
- Characterization of a fiber laser hydrophone for acoustic neutrino detection This paper presents the development and characterization of a fiber laser hydrophone designed for deep-sea applications, with a focus on detecting neutrino interactions via their acoustic signatures. The hydrophone design includes a static pressure compensation mechanism, ensuring reliable operation at depths exceeding 1 km. The performance of the hydrophone was evaluated through laboratory tests and experiments in an anechoic basin, where its transfer function was measured before and after a 140-bar pressure cycle. The results show that the hydrophone maintains its sensitivity, with resonance peaks identified in both low- and high-frequency ranges. The hydrophone's sensitivity to acoustic signals was also compared to ambient sea state noise levels, demonstrating compatibility with the lowest noise conditions. 8 authors · Jan 22, 2025
45 Towards World Simulator: Crafting Physical Commonsense-Based Benchmark for Video Generation Text-to-video (T2V) models like Sora have made significant strides in visualizing complex prompts, which is increasingly viewed as a promising path towards constructing the universal world simulator. Cognitive psychologists believe that the foundation for achieving this goal is the ability to understand intuitive physics. However, the capacity of these models to accurately represent intuitive physics remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhyGenBench, a comprehensive Physics Generation Benchmark designed to evaluate physical commonsense correctness in T2V generation. PhyGenBench comprises 160 carefully crafted prompts across 27 distinct physical laws, spanning four fundamental domains, which could comprehensively assesses models' understanding of physical commonsense. Alongside PhyGenBench, we propose a novel evaluation framework called PhyGenEval. This framework employs a hierarchical evaluation structure utilizing appropriate advanced vision-language models and large language models to assess physical commonsense. Through PhyGenBench and PhyGenEval, we can conduct large-scale automated assessments of T2V models' understanding of physical commonsense, which align closely with human feedback. Our evaluation results and in-depth analysis demonstrate that current models struggle to generate videos that comply with physical commonsense. Moreover, simply scaling up models or employing prompt engineering techniques is insufficient to fully address the challenges presented by PhyGenBench (e.g., dynamic scenarios). We hope this study will inspire the community to prioritize the learning of physical commonsense in these models beyond entertainment applications. We will release the data and codes at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/PhyGenBench 10 authors · Oct 7, 2024 3