Identifying Phase Space Boundaries with Voronoi Tessellations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using Voronoi tessellations to identify phase space boundaries in high energy physics data, improving mass measurements and aiding new physics discovery.

Contribution

It presents a novel geometric approach leveraging Voronoi tessellations to detect phase space boundaries in particle physics data, enhancing analysis accuracy.

Findings

Voronoi tessellation effectively identifies phase space boundaries

Method improves mass measurement precision

Supports validation of new physics discoveries

Abstract

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.