Interpretation of higher-order TDA (H1) artifacts in PXD background data

Determine the physical meaning of persistent H1 (loop) features observed in persistence diagrams of Pixel Vertex Detector (PXD) background point clouds by establishing whether and how these higher-order topological structures correspond to specific detector background interactions or decay processes, and characterize their relationship systematically.

Background

The thesis introduces Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to paper the clustering and geometric organization of PXD hits, showing that real PXD data and YonedaVAE outputs exhibit short-lived H0 components (connected clusters) and more persistent H1 features (loops). While H0 lifetimes align with line-like clusters, the physical interpretation of H1 loops remains unclear.

A concrete mapping between higher-order TDA artifacts (e.g., persistent H1 features) and underlying physics mechanisms (such as background interactions or decay topologies) would make TDA a practical diagnostic tool in detector simulation and could inform future generative model conditioning on topological structures.