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At least 145 records · Page 8

Investigating Electro-Nuclear Interactions in a New Dark Matter Search

Electro-nuclear (EN) interactions are interactions in which an incident electron collides with a nucleus, scattering the electron and creating byproduct particles. Such interactions are of interest to neutrino physicists, who use EN interactions to inform model building of neutrino-nucleus interactions. The Light Dark Matter Experiment (LDMX) is a small-scale, fixed-target, electron beam experiment which seeks to probe for dark matter and mediator particle production in the sub-GeV mass region. The 8GeV LDMX electron beam will serve as an opportunity to study electro-nuclear interactions in their final states in the multi-GeV region. LDMX’s missing energy trigger however, will not be sufficient to efficiently capture EN interactions. An additional trigger needs to be created. Using simulated background events, including EN interactions, for the LDMX experiment, a trigger on momentum was developed.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS

Fermilab Italian Student Program (Final Report)

I participated to the 2019 Fermilab Italian Student Program under the supervision of Anadi Canepa and Lorenzo Uplegger. I worked with the Fermilab research group that is involved with the R&D of the CMS Outer Tracker. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a a general-purpose detector located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator. In the next years LHC will undergo the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade, which will bring its luminosity from 1 × 10 34 cm -2 s -1 to 1.5 × 10 34 cm -2 s -1 . This increase in luminosity will require an upgrade of CMS as well, in order to comply with the augmented rate of particles which will cross the detector. The CMS tracker is a detector, composed of various modules made of silicon pixel trackers and silicon strip trackers, whose aim is to reconstruct the trajectories of the particles produced by the collisions in LHC. The tracker is ideally divided in Inner Tracker and Outer Tracker. The HL-LHC upgrade put important challenges in the designing of the tracker. It will have to withstand the irradiation of a large fluence of particles, without suffering a too severe deterioration of its performance. In addition to this, in order to comply with the increased rate of events that CMS will need to detect, the tracker will be exploited for triggering at the fully hardware Level 1 Trigger, in contrast to the current tracker, whose data are only used for the software High-Level Trigger. This feature is managed by the "stub logic", which will be explained in chapter 2. During the months of August and September at Fermilab I carried out the data analysis of three test beam runs performed in the last two years on the 2S Outer Tracker Minimules. The 2S Minimoule consists of two silicon strip trackers placed one upon the other with the strips kept parallel.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS

Exploring the Energy Frontier through Precision Tests and Fast Tracking with the CMS Detector (Final Technical Report)

This Early Career Award supported a research program using the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC to probe physics beyond the Standard Model in the top quark and Higgs boson sectors, alongside detector and trigger developments for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrade. The program (i) searched for charged lepton flavor violation (LFV) in the top quark sector with the full CMS Run-2 data set, placing the world’s strongest limits to date on the $t → eµq\ (q = u/c)$ branching fraction; (ii) developed preliminary analysis methods toward a boosted $t\bar{t}H(b\bar{b})$ measurement of the top quark Yukawa coupling and its CP properties; (iii) made leading contributions to the hardware-based Level-1 (L1) track finding system for the upgraded CMS detector for HL-LHC; and (iv) developed novel L1 trigger algorithms, notably a displaced vertex trigger enabling new searches for exotic long-lived particles.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS

Low-latency Jet Tagging for HL-LHC Using Transformer Architectures

Transformers are the state-of-the-art model architectures and widely used in application areas of machine learning. However the performance of such architectures is less well explored in the ultra-low latency domains where deployment on FPGAs or ASICs is required. Such domains include the trigger and data acquisition systems of the LHC experiments. We present a transformer-based algorithm for jet tagging built with the HGQ2 framework, which is able to produce a model with heterogeneous bitwidths for fast inference on FPGAs, as required in the trigger systems at the LHC experiments. The bitwidths are acquired during training by minimizing the total bit operations as an additional parameter. By allowing a bitwidth of zero, the model is pruned in-situ during training. Using this quantization-aware approach, our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance while also retaining permutation invariance which is a key property for particle physics applications. Due to the strength of transformers in representation learning, our work also serves as a stepping stone for the development of a larger foundation model for trigger applications.

Laatu, Lauri [Imperial Coll., London]

Two-Stage Wildlife Event Classification for Edge Deployment

Camera-based wildlife monitoring is often overwhelmed by non-target triggers and slowed by manual review or cloud-dependent inference, which can prevent timely intervention for high stakes human–wildlife conflicts. Our key contribution is a deployable, fully offline edge vision sensor that achieves near-real-time, highly accurate wildlife event classification by combining detector-based empty-image suppression with a lightweight classifier trained with a staged transfer-learning curriculum. Specifically, Stage 1 uses a pretrained You Only Look Once (YOLO)-family detector for permissive animal localization and empty-trigger suppression, and Stage 2 uses a lightweight EfficientNet-based binary classifier to confirm puma on detector crops and gate downstream actions. Our design is robust to low-quality nighttime monochrome imagery (motion blur, low contrast, illumination artifacts, and partial-body captures) and operates using commercially available components in connectivity-limited settings. In field deployments running since May 2025, end-to-end latency from camera trigger to action command is approximately 4 s. Ablation studies using a dataset of labeled wildlife images (pumas, not pumas) show that the two-stage approach substantially reduces false alarms in identifying pumas relative to a full-image classifier while maintaining high recall. On the held-out test set (N = 1434 events), the proposed two-stage cascade achieves precision 0.983, recall 0.975, F1 0.979, accuracy 0.986, and balanced accuracy 0.983, with only 8 false positives and 12 false negatives. The system can be easily adapted for other species, as demonstrated by rapid retraining of the second stage to classify ringtails. Downstream responses (e.g., notifications and optional audio/light outputs) provide flexible actuation capabilities that can be configured to support intervention.

58 GEOSCIENCES

Investigating Electro-Nuclear Interactions in a New Dark Matter Search

Electro-nuclear (EN) interactions are interactions in which an incident electron collides with a nucleus, scattering the electron and creating byproduct particles. Such interactions are of interest to neutrino physicists, who use EN interactions to inform model building of neutrino-nucleus interactions. The Light Dark Matter Experiment (LDMX) is a small-scale, fixed-target, electron beam experiment which seeks to probe for dark matter and mediator particle production in the sub-GeV mass region. The 8GeV LDMX electron beam will serve as an opportunity to study electro-nuclear interactions in final states in the multi-GeV region. LDMX s missing energy trigger for dark matter interactions however, will not be sufficient to efficiently capture EN interactions. An additional trigger is needed. Using simulated events, that included background and EN interactions, a trigger on momentum was developed.

Croteau, Beatrice

Proactive and Reactive Thermal Comfort Behaviors

The expansion of renewable electricity generation, growing demands due to electrification, greater prevalence of working from home, and increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events, will place new demands on the electric supply and distribution grid. Broader adoption of demand response programs (DRPs) for the residential sector may help meet these challenges; however, experience shows that occupant overrides in DRPs compromises their effectiveness. There is a lack of formal understanding of how discomfort, routines, and other motivations affect DRP overrides and other related human building interactions (HBI). This paper reports preliminary findings from a study of 20 households in Colorado and Massachusetts, US over three months. Participants responded to ecological momentary assessments (EMA) triggered by thermostat interactions and at random times throughout the day. EMAs included Likert-scale questions of thermal preference, preference intensity, and changes to 7 different activity types that could affect thermal comfort, and an opened ended question about motivations of such actions. Twelve tags were developed to categorize motivation responses and analyzed statistically to identify associations between motivations, preferences, and HBI actions. Reactions to changes in the thermal environment were the most frequently observed motivation (118 of 220 responses). On the other hand, almost half (47%) responses were at least partially motivated by non-thermal factors, suggesting limited utility for occupant behavior models founded solely on thermal comfort. Changes in activity level and clothing were less likely to be reported when EMAs were triggered by thermostat interactions, while fan interactions were more likely. Windows, shades, and portable heater interactions had no significant dependence on how the EMA was triggered. These results suggest that better understanding of motivations for HBI may improve effectiveness of demand response programs.

Pathak, Maharshi

Cape EGS: Frisco 2-P Well Stimulation Microseismic Data

This dataset contains microseismic data acquired during the Frisco 2-P well stimulation project led by Fervo Energy, conducted between June 1 and June 11, 2024, near the Utah FORGE geothermal site. The microseismic data was collected from various Utah FORGE wells: via Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) fiber in 16B, and three 3-component geophones located in wells 56-32, 78B, and 32. The dataset is structured in SEGY format, where the first nine traces represent data from the geophones, and the remaining traces capture DAS data from well 16B. Each SEGY file in this dataset contains triggered microseismic events, with event initiation based on Short-Time Average over Long-Time Average (STA/LTA) detection criteria during the stimulation process. Files are grouped by time intervals and named following the structure "[WellPad][WellName][Month]_[Year]Divine_Trigger[EventNumber].sgy," indicating well pad, well name, date, and event number. Sampling parameters include a spatial sampling of approximately 2 meters for DAS channels and a temporal sampling rate of 2000 Hz, with each data record spanning 1.2 seconds. The files' coordinates are referenced to the location of the FORGE 16A-32 wellhead, positioned at UTM coordinates: Easting 334641.1891 m and Northing 4263443.693 m. The geographic coordinates for this origin are 38.50402147 latitude and -112.8963897 longitude, with an elevation of 1650.0249 meters above sea level.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY

Real-Time Artificial Intelligence for Particle Reconstruction and Higgs Physics

With the discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN LHC, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator complex, scientists have acquired an important tool to study the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Precision measurements of Higgs bosons produced with large momentum allow for unique insights into the structure of the interactions of the Higgs boson with other particles that may shed light on physics beyond the standard model. While experimentally challenging, exploring such interactions with novel artificial intelligence (AI) methods can advance our understanding of the Higgs sector, including the Higgs boson's self-interaction. Moreover, the LHC is undergoing a major upgrade to further increase its particle collision rate and thereby operate for an additional decade. The experimental detectors at the upgraded facility must process at least a factor of ten more data at rates of hundreds of terabytes per second all under challenging conditions. New AI techniques are required to reconstruct and select, or trigger on, the most physics-sensitive events in real-time to handle the resulting avalanche of data. The proposed research will achieve the goals of the LHC program at the CMS experiment by developing a sub-microsecond event reconstruction system using real-time AI algorithms that employ field-programmable gate array technologies. By harnessing sophisticated AI techniques, this research focuses on measuring the production of Higgs bosons at large momentum while enhancing particle reconstruction methods in the trigger and beyond. Overall, the proposed research has broader implications for the use of AI in resource-constrained, low-latency embedded applications across all fields of science.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS

Search for Fast Magnetic Monopoles with NOvA Far Detector

The NOvA experiment at Fermilab consists of two functionally identical liquid scintillator detectors called near detector and far detector to study neutrino oscillations using GeV-scale neutrinos from the Fermilab NuMI beam. Due to its location close to the earth’s surface, surface area of over 4,000 $(m^{2})$, and little overburden, the NOvA far detector is sensitive to an extensive range of magnetic monopole masses and velocities. With the help of the far detector, we are looking for signals of relic monopoles in the cosmic rays flux that might have been produced in the early universe. We have developed the data-driven trigger(DDT), a robust trigger algorithm optimized for continuously searching the magnetic monopole-like patterns in the live data. Due to the surface proximity of the far detector, the major challenge for this analysis at the offline level is the rejection of cosmic ray background in the collected data. In this talk, I will present the status of the search for fast-moving magnetic monopoles using the data collected by the NOvA far detector.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS

Multiplicity-dependent jet modification from di-hadron correlations in pp collisions at $ \sqrt{s} $ = 13 TeV

Short-range correlations between charged particles are studied via two-particle angular correlations in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV. The correlation functions are measured as a function of the relative azimuthal angle ∆φ and the pseudorapidity separation ∆η for pairs of primary charged particles within the pseudorapidity interval |η| < 0.9 and the transverse-momentum range 1 < p T < 8 GeV/c. Near-side (|∆φ| < 1.3) peak widths are extracted from a generalised Gaussian fitted over the correlations in full pseudorapidity separation (|∆η| < 1.8), while the per-trigger associated near-side yields are extracted for the short-range correlations (|∆η| < 1.3). Both are evaluated as a function of charged-particle multiplicity obtained by two different event activity estimators. The width of the near-side peak decreases with increasing multiplicity, and this trend is reproduced qualitatively by the Monte Carlo event generators PYTHIA 8, AMPT, and EPOS. However, the models overestimate the width in the low transverse-momentum region (p T < 3 GeV/c). The per-trigger associated near-side yield increases with increasing multiplicity. Although this trend is also captured qualitatively by the considered event generators, the yield is mostly overestimated by the models in the considered kinematic range. The measurement of the shape and yield of the short-range correlation peak can help us understand the interplay between jet fragmentation and event activity, quantify the narrowing trend of the near-side peak as a function of transverse momentum and multiplicity selections in pp collisions, and search for final-state jet modification in small collision systems.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS

Speeding-up fuzzing through directional seeds

Abstract Fuzzing is an automated process for discovering inputs in a program that may trigger unexpected behavior. Today, fuzzing has become a standard practice for the discovery of bugs and security vulnerabilities. However, the main issue with such practices is that the exploration of the input space of programs can often be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, several alternative fuzzing strategies have been introduced during the last few years. Some fuzzing techniques rely on human expertise to provide a plausible set of initial input examples, namely, seeds. However, the process of handcrafting seeds for fuzzing purposes often becomes strenuous for humans as it requires a deeper understanding of the Program-Under-Test (PUT). Also, the use of known inputs to programs often does not trigger vulnerable program behavior or may not reach potentially vulnerable code locations. To address those issues, we propose a seed generation framework that enables Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) directed fuzzing where the human assumes a more active role in the creation of seeds that can penetrate and assess desired locations of the PUT. Our proposed framework uses Symbolic Execution (SE) to generate seeds that exercise paths to target program locations. Moreover, our framework enables the visualization of the explored execution paths in the binary of the PUT for the generated seeds. We evaluated our approach on a set of 12 carefully designed C programs with diverse characteristics that mimic real-world programs. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in improving the performance of standard fuzzing tools such as the American Fuzzy Lop ("Image missing" <#comment/> ). Specifically, our solution can generate seeds that substantially enhance the performance of the fuzzer, achieving speedups ranging from $$1.46\times $$ 1.46 × to $$68.53\times $$ 68.53 × for branch conditions, $$1.39\times $$ 1.39 × to $$254.62\times $$ 254.62 × for branch depths, $$14,879.59\times $$ 14 , 879.59 × to $$30,295.88\times $$ 30 , 295.88 × for branch widths over traditional seeds. Additionally, the speedup increases with the number of target function ranging from $$12,260\times $$ 12 , 260 × to $$22,856.07\times $$ 22 , 856.07 × over traditional seeds while only requiring less than 15 seconds on average for the seed generation step.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

A machine learning based approach to online electron reconstruction at CLAS12

Online reconstruction is key for monitoring purposes and real time analysis in High Energy and Nuclear Physics experiments. A necessary component of reconstruction algorithms is particle identification that combines information left by a particle passing through several detector components to identify the particle’s type. Of particular interest to electro-production Nuclear Physics experiments such as CLAS12 is electron identification which is used to trigger data recording. A machine learning approach was developed for CLAS12 to reconstruct and identify electrons by combining raw signals at the data acquisition level from several detector components. Here, this approach achieves an electron identification purity above 75% whilst retaining an efficiency close to 100%. The machine learning tools are capable of running at high rates exceeding the data acquisition rates and will allow electron reconstruction in real-time. This work enhances online analyses and monitoring and can contribute to improved triggering at CLAS12. This machine learning driven approach will also be crucial for experiments aiming to transition to streaming readout operations where online reconstruction will be a key component of the data taking paradigm.

Artificial intelligence

Thermal and electric multidomain dynamic model for integration of power grid distribution with behind-the-meter devices

As renewable energy sources like solar and wind power become more integrated into the grid, coordinated control of behind-the-meter devices is crucial for enhancing grid flexibility and reliability and for meeting cost targets, with standardized models being developed to support this transition. The increasing flexibility and uncertainty of integrated renewable energy grids, along with interactions between various subsystems, make traditional steady-state modeling insufficient to capture transient and dynamic behaviors. Current models (e.g., composite load and battery equivalent models) focus on thermodynamic or electrical characteristics but overlook critical electromechanical interactions. This limits the ability to share performance information for grid services and hampers fast dynamic simulations. In addition, motor stalling is usually triggered by a fault event and attributed to the characteristics of the mechanical torque of the motor, resulting in absorption of a large amount of reactive power during the stalling period. Further, this significant withdrawal of reactive power will deteriorate the dynamic voltage stability of power grids and cause delayed voltage recovery. Therefore, an in-depth modeling of the thermodynamics or mechanical torque is essential to study the impacts of the realistic torque characteristics of those behind-the-meter devices on power system voltage stability. This study developed a dynamic multidomain model for building HVAC systems, such as air-source heat pumps, to simulate their thermal and electrical responses to grid transients. The model can accurately predict power metrics with a mean absolute percentage error of 10%, by validating against with power system computer-aided design performance data. Case studies demonstrate the model capability of capturing the transient response to sudden voltage changes, rapid load fluctuations, and system shutdowns respectively. During a sudden voltage drop (30% for 0.1s), a fully loaded heat pump’s motor speed dropped, continued declining, and shut down after 3.6s, with severe power oscillations and a torque spike. A partially loaded unit experienced temporary oscillations but stabilized. Under higher building loads, compressor speed increased from 64% to 100%, with power and torque rising before stabilizing. In safety-triggered shutdowns, power decreased after minor fluctuations, and torque briefly spiked before dropping to zero.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION

Physics-aware adaptive checkpointing with shadow systems for nonlinear PDE simulations

Large-scale simulations of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) that exhibit strongly transient behavior and pattern-forming dynamics produce enormous amounts of data, which, even with modern storage systems, cannot be stored for later curation. Current I/O strategies either write dense time series of snapshots, which is often prohibitive in I/O and storage, or store a few checkpoints that enable restart but incur expensive recomputation cost and provide no control over post-restart error growth, especially when lossy compression is used. Moreover, most, if not all, existing strategies take no account of the actual physical state of the system. Here, we present a simple physics-aware I/O framework in which a low-cost shadow system adaptively triggers lossy checkpoints when the shadow system deviates from the fine-scale simulation. The shadow system can be a coarsened replica of the fine-scale simulation that evolves concurrently. This means that checkpoints are taken based on the physical state of the system: fewer checkpoints are triggered when the system is quiescent while more are taken when the system undergoes a rapid change. This type of behavior is observed in many systems such as Brusselator and FitzHugh–Nagumo. We illustrate that our framework maintains stable restarts, keeps fine-scale restart errors bounded by shadow errors, and reconstructs the time history with significantly lower error and storage than interpolating fixed-interval snapshots, with low-cost shadow replay and modest online synchronization overhead.

Gong, Qian [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000235704142)

Design of an 8-channel 40 GS/s 20 mW/Ch waveform sampling ASIC in 65 nm CMOS

One picosecond timing resolution is the entry point to signature based searches relying on secondary/tertiary vertices and particle identification. We describe PSEC5, an 8-channel 40 GS/s waveform-sampling ASIC in TSMC 65 nm process targetting one picosecond resolution at 20 mW power per channel. Each channel consists of four fast and one slow switched capacitor arrays (SCA), allowing for picosecond time resolution combined with a long effective buffer. Each fast SCA is 1.6 ns long and has a nominal sampling rate of 40 GS/s. The slow SCA is 204.8 ns long and samples at 5 GS/s. Recording of the analog data for each channel is triggered by a fast discriminator capable of multiple triggering during the window of the slow SCA. To achieve a large dynamic range, low leakage, and high bandwidth, the SCA sampling switches are implemented as 2.5 V nMOSFETs controlled by 1.2 V shift registers. Stored analog data are digitized by an external ADC at 10 bits or better. Specifications on operational parameters include a 4 GHz analog bandwidth and a dead time of 20 microseconds, corresponding to a 50 kHz readout rate, determined by the choice of the external ADC. PSEC5 has been submitted for fabrication.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND

Design and construction of the CMS Outer Tracker for the phase-2 upgrade

The High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is expected to deliver an integrated luminosity of 3000–4000 fb −1 over 10 years of operation with the peak instantaneous luminosity reaching about 5–7.5 × 1 0 34 cm −2 s −1 . During Long Shutdown 3, several components of the CMS detector will undergo major improvements, called Phase-2 upgrades, to be able to operate in the challenging environment of the HL-LHC. The current CMS tracker will be replaced. The Phase-2 Outer Tracker (OT) will have increased radiation tolerance, higher granularity, and the capability to handle higher data rates. Moreover, the OT will provide tracking information to the Level-1 trigger for the first time at a hadron collider, allowing trigger rates to be kept at a sustainable level without sacrificing physics potential. For this, the OT will be made of modules with two closely-spaced silicon sensors read out by front-end ASICs that can correlate hits in the two sensors to create short track segments, used in the Level-1 track finder. The modules come in two flavors: strip-strip and pixel-strip, containing different sensor configurations and multiple ASICs. This contribution presents the Phase-2 OT, the finalization of the OT module design, and the quality assurance and control procedures used to ensure that the modules fulfill both the specifications from the assembly steps as well as the proper communication among the ASICs.

Zoi, Irene [Fermilab] (ORCID:0000000257389446)

The MUSE Target Chamber Post Veto

The Muon Scattering Experiment (MUSE) was developed to address the proton radius puzzle through simultaneous electron–proton and muon-proton scattering using the Paul Scherrer Institute’s πM1 secondary beamline. MUSE uses a large-solid-angle, non-magnetic spectrometer to detect beam particles scattering from a liquid hydrogen cell contained within a vacuum chamber. Due to the large scattering windows, the structural integrity of the chamber is supported by posts located at small scattering angles. While out of the acceptance, particles in the tails of the beam distribution can strike these posts, causing a significant trigger background. We describe the design and performance of the Target Chamber Post Veto (TCPV) detector installed inside the vacuum chamber to remove these background events at the trigger level.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND