21–26 Jun 2026
U. Ottawa - Learning Crossroads (CRX) Building
America/Toronto timezone
Welcome to the 2026 CAP Congress Program website! / Bienvenue au siteweb du programme du Congrès de l'ACP 2026!

Applying Machine Learning Techniques to the PIONEER Experiment’s Active Target

23 Jun 2026, 18:00
1h 30m
U. Ottawa - Learning Crossroads (CRX) Building

U. Ottawa - Learning Crossroads (CRX) Building

100 Louis-Pasteur Private, Ottawa, ON K1N 9N3
Poster Competition (Graduate Student) / Compétition affiches (Étudiant(e) 2e ou 3e cycle) Particle Physics / Physique des particules (PPD) PPD Poster Session & Student Poster Competition | Session d'affiches PPD et concours d'affiches étudiantes

Speaker

Meghan Naar (TRIUMF)

Description

The PIONEER experiment is a next-generation investigation into rare pion decays, aimed at probing beyond the Standard Model (SM) physics by accurately measuring the charged-pion branching ratio of electrons versus muons Re/$\mu$ - providing a sensitive test of Lepton Flavour Universality. The SM provides a calculation of Re/$\mu$ at the 0.01% level, a factor 15 times better than the most precise experimental measurement. The PIONEER experiment aims at closing the precision gap between theory and experiment, with the possibility of revealing new physics at the PeV scale. PIONEER has been proposed and approved with high priority at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.

This poster will focus on applying machine learning (ML) techniques to PIONEER’s active target (ATAR). The ATAR is a central piece of the detector and a key enhancement over earlier experiments measuring Re/$\mu$. It is composed of 48 successive planes of 120$\mu$m thin low-gain avalanche diodes (LGADs). This technology allows 5-dimensional event reconstruction providing precise timing, energy, and three-dimensional spatial information. ML offers an attractive alternative to traditional reconstruction and analysis approaches for pattern recognition. This work explores the integration of a neural-network architecture based on transformers into the ATAR reconstruction pipeline, and investigates its performance and potential for particle identification and tracking.

Keyword-1 Machine Learning
Keyword-2 Active Target

Author

Meghan Naar (TRIUMF)

Presentation materials

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