Identifying Phase Space Boundaries with Voronoi Tessellations

• Published in: arXiv.org
• Main Authors: Debnath, Dipsikha, Gainer, James S, Kilic, Can, Kim, Doojin, Matchev, Konstantin T, Yuan-Pao, Yang
• Format: Paper Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 05.05.2017
• Subjects: Boundaries; Particle decay; Phenomenology; Physics - High Energy Physics - Experiment; Physics - High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; Voronoi graphs
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1606.02721

Determining the masses of new physics particles appearing in decay chains is an important and longstanding problem in high energy phenomenology. Recently it has been shown that these mass measurements can be improved by utilizing the boundary of the allowed region in the fully differentiable phase space in its full dimensionality. Here we show that the practical challenge of identifying this boundary can be solved using techniques based on the geometric properties of the cells resulting from Voronoi tessellations of the relevant data. The robust detection of such phase space boundaries in the data could also be used to corroborate a new physics discovery based on a cut-and-count analysis.