A neural network to identify neutral mesons

Both π0 and η mesons decay long before they can reach a detector. They predominantly decay by emission of two photons, and are identified by constructing the invariant mass of the photons. Misidentified mesons result from ambiguity in associating photons. Our work tries to select which pair is the most likely to be a physical one rather than a chance one. We first designed a Hopfield neural net, but all the activities converged rapidly towards zero except the highest one. To improve the solution we slew down the computation in order to let the network explore several states and to impose activities to converge towards one for all selected pairs. This was achieved by adding links connecting each cell to itself. The network performance is all the more interesting that the solid angle covered by the detector is greater than 15%. (D.L.). 5 refs