Autoencoders for real-time SUEP detection
S. S. Chhibra, N. Chernyavskaya, Benedikt Maier, M. Pierini, Syed Mehedi Hasan · The European Physical Journal Plus · 2024
Abstract Confining dark sectors with pseudo-conformal dynamics can produce Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns (SUEP), at the Large Hadron Collider: the production of dark quarks in proton–proton collisions leading to a dark shower and the high-multiplicity production of dark hadrons. The final experimental signature is spherically symmetric energy deposits by an anomalously large number of soft Standard Model particles with a transverse energy of O(100) $$\,\text {MeV}$$ MeV . Assuming Yukawa-like couplings of the scalar portal state, the dominant production mode is gluon fusion, and the dominant background comes from multi-jet QCD events. We have developed a deep learning-based Anomaly Detection technique to reject QCD jets and identify any anomalous signature, including SUEP, in real-time in the High-Level Trigger system of experiments like the Compact Muon Solenoid at the Large Hadron Collider. A deep convolutional neural autoencoder network has been trained using QCD events by taking transverse energy deposits in the inner tracker, electromagnetic calorimeter, and hadron calorimeter sub-detectors as 3-channel image data. Due to the sparse nature of the data, only $$\sim $$ ∼ 0.5% of the total $$\sim $$ ∼ $${300}\,\textrm{k}$$ 300 k image pixels have nonzero values. To tackle this challenge, a nonstandard loss function, the inverse of the so-called Dice Loss, is exploited. The trained autoencoder with learned spatial features of QCD jets can detect 40% of the SUEP events, with a QCD event mistagging rate as low as 2%. The model inference time has been measured using the $$^{\texttt {TM}}$$ TM processor and found to be $$\sim $$ ∼ $${20}\textrm{ms}$$ 20 ms , which perfectly satisfies the High-Level Trigger system’s latency of $$\mathcal {O}(10^2)~\textrm{ms}$$ O ( 10 2 ) ms . Given the virtue of the unsupervised learning of the autoencoders, the trained model can be applied to any new physics model that predicts an experimental signature anomalous to QCD jets.