Deep Machine Learning for the PANDA Software Trigger

Deep machine learning methods have been studied for the software trigger of the future PANDA experiment at FAIR, using Monte Carlo simulated data from the GEANT-based detector simulation framework PandaRoot. Ten physics channels that cover the main physics topics, including electromagnetic, exotic, charmonium, open charm, and baryonic reaction channels, have been investigated at four different anti-proton beam momenta. Binary and multi-class classification together with seven different network architectures have been studied. Finally a residual convolutional neural network with four residual blocks in a binary classification scheme has been chosen due to its extendability, performance and stability. The presented study represents a feasibility study of a completely software-based trigger system. Compared to a conventional selection method, the deep machine learning approach achieved a significant efficiency gain of up to 200\%, while keeping the background reduction factor at the required level of 1/1000. Furthermore, it is shown that the use of additional input variables can improve the data quality for subsequent analysis. This study shows that the PANDA software trigger can benefit greatly from the deep machine learning methods.