2024 RHIC/AGS Annual Users' Meeting

11 Jun 2024, 08:00 → 14 Jun 2024, 18:00 US/Eastern

Anders Knospe (Lehigh University), Anthony Hodges (University of Illinois), Marzia Rosati (Iowa State University (mrosati@iastate.edu)), Zhenyu Ye (University of Illinois at Chicago)

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The Annual RHIC & AGS Users' Meeting will be held on June 11-14, 2024. The meeting will highlight the latest results from the PHENIX, STAR and sPHENIX experiments and provide an outlook with the future programs at RHIC and the EIC.

Workshops that will be held on Tuesday, June 11 and Wednesday, June 12 will enable more in-depth discussions of the following topics:

 * Beam Energy Scan
 * Computing, Machine Learning, & AI
 * Heavy Flavor & Quarkonia
 * Jets
 * Spin Physics, Cold QCD, & UPCs
 * Flow & Vorticity
 * Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

There will be an in-person poster session on Thursday, June 13. Plenary sessions will be held on Thursday, June 13 and Friday, June 14. Reports on operation status from the sPHENIX and STAR experiments and highlights from PHENIX, sPHENIX and STAR experiments, EIC detectors, reports from representatives from the funding agencies, and award ceremonies will be held during the plenary sessions.

Event ID: E000005813

Note: This meeting falls under Exemption E. Meetings such as Advisory Committee and Federal Advisory Committee meetings. Solicitation/Funding Opportunity Announcement Review Board meetings, peer review/objective review panel meetings, evaluation panel/board meetings, and program kick-off and review meetings (including those for grants and contracts) are open to the public.

Tuesday, 11 June

08:00 → 17:00 Computing, Machine Learning, & AI

Conveners: Jakub Kvapil (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Tanner Mengel (University of Tennessee (UTK))

08:00 Overview of Artificial Intelligence at RHIC and Beyond

This talk will provide an overview of applications of artificial intelligence at RHIC for a variety of purposes ranging from data-taking to physics analysis. Applications ongoing and envisioned for the upcoming EIC will also be discussed.

Speaker: Hannah Bossi

08:30 TBD: Event generation

Speaker: Yeonju Go (University of Colorado, Boulder)

09:00 Interpretable Machine Learning applications to Jet Background Subtraction

Reconstructing jets in heavy collisions has always required dealing with the challenges of a high background environment. Traditional techniques, such as the area based method, suffered from poor resolution at low momenta due to the large fluctuating background there. In recent years, the resolution has been improved by using machine learning to estimate the background. While machine learning tends to lead to improvements in general (wherever it is applied), care must be taken to ensure these improvements do not come at the cost of interpretability or bias from models used for training. We demonstrate a middle path – using machine learning techniques to translate “black-box” models (such as neural nets) into human interpretable formulas. We present a novel application of symbolic regression to extract a functional representation of a deep neural network trained to subtract background for measurements of jets in heavy ion collisions. With this functional representation we show that the relationship learned by a neural network is approximately the same as a new background subtraction method using the particle multiplicity in a jet. We compare the multiplicity method to the deep neural network method alone, showing its increased interpretability and comparable performance. We also discuss the application of these techniques to background subtraction for jets measured at the EIC.

Speaker: Charles Hughes (Iowa State University)

09:30 Coffee break

10:00 TBD: Information distillation for the particle collider data with Deep Learning

Speaker: Yi Huang (Brookhaven national lab)

10:30 TBD: FastML triggering in sPHENIX (Autonomous selection of physics events)

Speaker: Cameron Dean (MIT)

11:00 TBD: Identifying quenched jets with ML

Speaker: Yilun Wu (Vanderbilt University)

11:30 Lunch

13:00 TBD: ML for detector design

Speaker: Cristiano Fanelli (affiliate@jlab.org;member@jlab.org)

13:30 TBD: Calo Calibrations with ML

Speaker: Derek Anderson (Iowa State University)

14:00 TBD: luminosity optimization project

Speaker: Xiaofeng Gu (Collider Accelerator Department, BNL)

14:30 Coffee break

15:00 TBD: RL for accelerators

Speaker: Yuan Gao

15:30 TBD: Omnifold

Speaker: Youqi Song (Yale University)

16:00 TBD

09:00 → 15:00 Flow & Vorticity

Conveners: Niseem (Magdy) Abdelrahman (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Yu Hu (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

12:00 → 18:00 Cold QCD, Spin Physics, & UPCs from RHIC to the EIC

Conveners: Daniel Brandenburg (Ohio State University), Jae Nam (Temple University), Sookhyun Lee (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Wednesday, 12 June

08:00 → 12:00 Jets

Conveners: Anthony Hodges (University of Illinois), Jussi Viinikainen (University of Illinois at Chicago), Tristan Protzman (Lehigh University)

08:00 Theory Overview

Speaker: Yacine Mehtar-Tani (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

08:35 X-SCAPE

Speaker: Mayank Singh (McGill University)

09:00 Jet Physics at the EIC

Speaker: Felix Ringer (UC Berkeley/LBNL)

09:25 Coffee Break

10:00 Experimental Overview

Speaker: Prof. Laura Havener (Yale University)

10:35 Synergies Between RHIC and LHC Jet Measurements

Speaker: Virginia Bailey (Georgia State University)

11:00 Path-Length Dependent Energy Loss

Speaker: Megan Connors (Georgia State University)

11:25 Jet Substructure

Speaker: Dhanush Hangal (Lawrence Livermore Nat. Laboratory (US))

09:00 → 15:00 Beam Energy Scan

Conveners: Yevheniia Khyzhniak (Ohio State University), Zachary Sweger (University of California, Davis), Zhiwan Xu (University of California, Los Angeles)

09:00 → 17:00 Heavy Flavor

Conveners: Anthony Frawley (Florida State University), Antonio Carlos Oliveira da Silva (Iowa State University)

13:00 → 17:00 Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Convener: Justin Frantz (Ohio University)

Thursday, 13 June

09:00 → 18:00 Plenary Session I

09:00 Welcome Remarks

Speaker: JoAnne Hewett (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)

09:10 Opening Remarks

Speaker: Haiyan Gao (BNL)

09:35 C-AD Report

Speaker: Kiel Hock (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

10:00 STAR Run 24 Report

Speaker: Jaroslav Adam (BNL)

10:25 sPHENIX Run 24 Report

10:50 Coffee Break & Poster Session

11:15 Report from DOE

11:45 Report from NSF

Speaker: Allena Opper (National Science Foundation)

12:15 No Host Lunch Break & Poster Session

14:00 Report from the DOE Office of Nuclear Science Research Division

Speaker: Sharon Stephenson (U.S. Department of Energy)

14:30 TBA

14:50 Coffee Break & Poster Session

15:20 sPHENIX Highlights

Speaker: Thomas Hemmick (Stony Brook University)

15:50 PHENIX Highlights

Speaker: Ron Belmont (University of North Carolina Greensboro)

16:20 STAR Highlights

Speaker: Yicheng Feng (Purdue University)

16:50 Presentation of Merit & Thesis Awards

Speaker: JoAnne Hewett (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)

17:30 Poster Session & Cocktail Hour

Friday, 14 June

09:00 → 14:00 Plenary Session II

10:00 EIC Project Status

Speaker: James Fast (Jefferson Lab)

10:30 Coffee Break

11:00 ePIC: Status & Plans

Speaker: Zhoudunming Tu (BNL)

11:30 EIC Detector II: Status & Plans

Speaker: Anselm Vossen (Duke University)

12:00 Report from BNL Facilities

Speaker: Thomas Daniels (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

12:20 Poster Awards & Flash Talk

12:40 Business Meeting & UEC Election Results

Speaker: Marzia Rosati (Iowa State University (mrosati@iastate.edu))

13:00 End of Meeting Luncheon