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AI Meets Antimatter: Unveiling Antihydrogen Annihilations (arxiv.org)
1 point by throwawayed1 on Dec 3, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A neural network reads the detector's hit pattern and predicts where an antihydrogen atom annihilated, a key step for weighing antimatter. Combining several copies of the network gave more than twice the precision of the standard technique, with similarly small bias.

Abstract

The ALPHA-g experiment at CERN aims to perform the first-ever direct measurement of the effect of gravity on antimatter, determining its weight to within 1% precision. This measurement requires an accurate prediction of the vertical position of annihilations within the detector. In this work, we present a novel approach to annihilation position reconstruction using an ensemble of models based on the PointNet deep learning architecture. The newly developed model, PointNet Ensemble for Annihilation Reconstruction (PEAR) outperforms the standard approach to annihilation position reconstruction, providing more than twice the resolution while maintaining a similarly low bias. This work may also offer insights for similar efforts applying deep learning to experiments that require high resolution and low bias.

Ashley Ferreira, Mahip Singh, Andrea Capra, Ina Carli, Daniel Duque Quiceno, Wojciech T. Fedorko, Makoto M. Fujiwara, Muyan Li, Lars Martin, Yukiya Saito, Gareth Smith, Anqi Xu
arXiv:2412.00961 · physics.data-an, cs.LG · submitted Dec 1, 2024 · updated Dec 3, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences Workshop at the 38th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

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