Is the bump significant? An axion-search example

Abstract

Many experiments in physics involve searching for a localized excess over background expectations in an observed spectrum. If the background is known and there is Gaussian noise, the amount of excess of successive observations can be quantified by the runs statistic taking care of the look-elsewhere effect. The distribution of the runs statistic under the background model is known analytically but the computation becomes too expensive for more than about a hundred observations. This work demonstrates a principled high-precision extrapolation from a few dozen up to millions of data points. It is most precise in the interesting regime when an excess is present. The method is verified for benchmark cases and successfully applied to real data from an axion search. The code that implements our method is available at https://github.com/fredRos/runs .

18 pages, 8 figures. v2 fixes arxiv's parsing of the URL in the abstract

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
• Dielectric Haloscopes: A New Way to Detect Axion Dark Matter
• Choosing Between Methods of Combining p-values

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Revealing the Dark Matter Halo with Axion Direct Detection
• A new experimental approach to probe QCD axion dark matter in the mass range above 40$\mu$eV
• Improved limits on the coupling of ultralight bosonic dark matter to photons from optical atomic clock comparisons
• An improved analysis framework for axion dark matter searches
• Bias-Free Estimation of Signals on Top of Unknown Backgrounds