Efficient description of experimental effects in amplitude analyses

Abstract

Amplitude analysis is a powerful technique to study hadron decays. A significant complication in these analyses is the treatment of instrumental effects, such as background and selection efficiency variations, in the multidimensional kinematic phase space. This paper reviews conventional methods to estimate efficiency and background distributions and outlines the methods of density estimation using Gaussian processes and artificial neural networks. Such techniques see widespread use elsewhere, but have not gained popularity in use for amplitude analyses. Finally, novel applications of these models are proposed, to estimate background density in the signal region from the sidebands in multiple dimensions, and a more general method for model-assisted density estimation using artificial neural networks.