Constructing model-agnostic likelihoods, a method for the reinterpretation of particle physics results

Abstract

Experimental High Energy Physics has entered an era of precision measurements. However, measurements of many of the accessible processes assume that the final states' underlying kinematic distribution is the same as the Standard Model prediction. This assumption introduces an implicit model-dependency into the measurement, rendering the reinterpretation of the experimental analysis complicated without reanalysing the underlying data. We present a novel reweighting method in order to perform reinterpretation of particle physics measurements. It makes use of reweighting the Standard Model templates according to kinematic signal distributions of alternative theoretical models, prior to performing the statistical analysis. The generality of this method allows us to perform statistical inference in the space of theoretical parameters, assuming different kinematic distributions, according to a beyond Standard Model prediction. We implement our method as an extension to the pyhf software and interface it with the EOS software, which allows us to perform flavor physics phenomenology studies. Furthermore, we argue that, beyond the pyhf or HistFactory likelihood specification, only minimal information is necessary to make a likelihood model-agnostic and hence easily reinterpretable. We showcase that publishing such likelihoods is crucial for a full exploitation of experimental results.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Disentangling new physics in $K\to \pi \bar{\nu }\nu$ and $B\to K(K^{\ast })\bar{\nu }\nu$ observables
• Joint LHCb--Belle II Prospects to Constrain New Physics in $B\to D^{(\ast )}\tau \nu$
• Feasibility Study of Lepton Number Violation in Rare $B$ and $K$ Meson Decays
• Probing invisible particles with charm
• Model-agnostic likelihood for the reinterpretation of the $B^{+}\to K^{+}\nu \bar{\nu }$ measurement at Belle II