Bibliography: p. 212-221. / Coincident protons from the reaction ¹²C(p,2p) at an incident proton energy of 200 Me V, have been measured using conventional particle telescopes. Data were acquired at nine pairs of angles (θ₂=20°, 45°, 70°, 95°, 120° and 145° for θ₁ =-20°, and θ₂=35°, 85° and 135° for θ₁ =-45°). An improved model, based on previous theoretical and experimental work, has been proposed to describe the reaction mechanism leading to the observed coincident proton yield from the nuclear continuum. This model considers an initial quasifree nucleon-nucleon interaction - described by a distorted wave impulse approximation (DWIA) treatment - between the incident proton and a single target nucleon, followed by the rescattering of the struck nucleon, which behaves as an intranuclear projectile, from the spectator part of the target nucleus. The validity of the DWIA treatment used in the continuum study, has been tested by analysing the kinematic regions of the coincident proton energy spectra corresponding to the knockout of protons from the outer lp3/2 orbital of ¹²C which do not undergo further interactions with the residual nucleus. Good agreement in shape has been found between the calculated and measured cross sections in the kinematic region of interest to the continuum study. An average spectroscopic factor of 1.1±0.3 was extracted. Except in the -20°,20° case, the DWIA treatment was found to be insensitive to the choice of the initial or final energy prescriptions for the two-body scattering approximation. Nonlocality effects were found to be small, changing the absolute value of spectroscopic factors by a maximum of 20%. Coincident continuum cross sections were extracted from the experimental data corresponding to the detection of protons at the θ₁ angles with energies of 70±5 MeV, 100±5 MeV and 130±5 MeV. Comparisons were made with calculations which modelled the proposed reaction mechanism in terms of a convolution integral over the DWIA cross sections describing the initial quasifree knockout process and experimental inelastic scattering probabilities describing the further multiple scattering interactions undergone by the knocked out nucleons. Good agreement has been found between the normalized calculated and measured continuum cross sections (spectroscopic factors varying from 0.8 to 2.3 between sets of data, depending on the kinematic region sampled and the prescription used for the two-body scattering approximation). It has been shown that contributions from nucleons that are knocked out both in- and out-of-plane in the initial quasifree process should be considered, and that the contribution from neutron knockout in the initial interaction is significant, ranging from 0.13 to 0.62 that of the proton knockout contribution.

Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPCs) represent one of the most widely utilized neutrino detection techniques in neutrino experiments, for instance, in the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program and the future large-scale LArTPC: Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). The high-end technique, facilitating excellent spatial and calorimetric reconstruction resolution, also enables testing exotic Beyond Standard Model (BSM) theories, such as baryon number violation (BNV) processes (e.g., proton-decay, neutron-antineutron oscillation). At the same time, Machine Learning (ML) techniques have demonstrated their ubiquitous use in recent decades; ML techniques have also become some of the most powerful tools in high-energy physics (HEP) analyses. Furthermore, the development of algorithms to cater to the needs of problems in HEP (i.e., triggering, reconstruction, improving sensitivity, etc.) has also become an active area of research. By developing a combined approach using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Boosted Decision Tree (BDT) techniques, the sensitivity of neutron-antineutron oscillation in DUNE is evaluated for a projected exposure of 400kton⋅ years. Additionally, to meet the triggering requirement to select such rare events in DUNE, such a search is only supported with highly efficient self-triggering algorithms. An ML-based self-triggering scheme for large-scale LArTPCs, such as DUNE, is also developed with the intention of implementation on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The ML-based approach for searching for neutron-antineutron oscillation can be demonstrated and validated on the current LArTPC MicroBooNE. The analysis in MicroBooNE represents the first-ever search for neutron-antineutron oscillation in a LArTPC. DUNE's projected 90％ C.L. sensitivity to the neutron antineutron oscillation lifetime is 6.45✕10³² years, assuming 1.327✕10³⁵ neutron⋅ years, equivalent to 10 years of DUNE far detector exposure (400kton⋅ years). For MicroBooNE, assuming 372 seconds of exposure (equivalent to 3.13✕10³⁶ neutron⋅ years), the 90% C.L. lifetime sensitivity is found at 3.07✕10²⁵ yrs, after accounting for Monte-Carlo statistical uncertainty and systematic uncertainty from detector effects.

A search is presented for hadronic signatures of a strongly-coupled hidden dark sector, accessed via resonant production of a ?′ mediator. The analysis uses 139 fb-1 of proton-proton collision data collected by the ATLAS experiment during Run 2 of the LHC. The ?′ mediator decays to two dark quarks, which each hadronize and decay to showers containing both dark and Standard Model particles; these showers are termed “semi-visible” jets. The final state consists of missing energy aligned with one of the jets, a topology that is ignored by most dark matter searches. A supervised machine learning method is used to select these dark showers and reject the dominant background of mis-measured multijet events. A complementary semi-supervised anomaly detection approach introduces broad sensitivity to a variety of strongly coupled dark matter models. A resonance search is performed by fitting the transverse mass spectrum with a polynomial background estimation function. Results are presented as limits on the effective cross section of the Z', parameterized by the fraction of invisible particles in the decay and the Z' mass. No structure in the transverse mass spectrum compatible with the signal hypothesis is observed. Z' mediator masses from ranging from 2.0 TeV to 3.5 TeV are excluded at the 95% confidence level.