Daniel Whiteson

Dec 4, 2024 | aspendailynews.com | Daniel Whiteson

Unraveling the nature of the universe is never cheap. The Large Hadron Collider, which discovered the famous Higgs boson and the James Webb Space Telescope, cost billions of dollars. Now, particle physicists are cooking up plans for a next generation collider that might cost many more billions. How can they possibly justify those costs? How much are the secrets of the universe worth? What secrets are left to unravel, anyway? You might imagine that we have mostly solved the riddles of physics.

May 4, 2024 | newsbreak.com | Daniel Whiteson

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May 3, 2024 | aspendailynews.com | Daniel Whiteson

Scientists talk about dark matter an awful lot for something they don’t actually understand very well. They say that it’s important — and that we wouldn’t have stars and galaxies without it — though they’ve never seen it. They say that it’s most of the matter in the universe, but they’ve never found a speck of it. They can’t see it or touch it. They only have a vague idea of where it is and where it isn’t. Science knows more about what dark matter isn’t than what it is.

Apr 29, 2024 | nature.com | Michael James Fenton |Hideki Okawa |Shih-Chieh Hsu |Daniel Whiteson

AbstractReconstructing unstable heavy particles requires sophisticated techniques to sift through the large number of possible permutations for assignment of detector objects to the underlying partons. An approach based on a generalized attention mechanism, symmetry preserving attention networks (SPA-NET), has been previously applied to top quark pair decays at the Large Hadron Collider which produce only hadronic jets.

Nov 17, 2023 | link.aps.org | Edmund Witkowski |Benjamin Nachman |Daniel Whiteson

Abstract We use unlabeled collision data and weakly supervised learning to train models that can distinguish prompt muons from nonprompt muons using patterns of low-level particle activity in the vicinity of the muon and interpret the models in the space of energy flow polynomials. Particle activity associated with muons is a valuable tool for identifying prompt muons, those due to heavy boson decay, from muons produced in the decay of heavy flavor jets.