08 December 2025 Monday

W: 6 DW: 2 OT: 2 ex

see above

• See logs above

• Good games 5s both courts
• played decent

• See logs above

Dear Authors,

Congratulations on the analysis and the well-written draft. Here are some comment from the CMU group. Good luck with the rest of the review!

best John Alison

Type B comments: L123-125: So does p(Ncs)=0 mean 100% of the transitions are Delta_NCS = −1 and 0% are +1? I think the meaning of p(Ncs) could be clarified a bit. L150: With the input fixed to 30 objects, are particles beyond the leading 30 discarded? Does this truncation affect the sensitivity for high-multiplicity signals? L150: How often does it happen that the list of 30 objects is zero-padded or truncated? Could this bias the metric? L170: Why are the tight veto ID criteria only applied to the leading jet? Section 5: Why bother identifying electrons and photons ? eg: why not just treat them as jets ? Is this to improve the energy measurement ? L195: What does the quoted “70%” improvement represent (mean, median, or a specific benchmark), given the wide 2–200% range? L193-196: The large variation of 2-200% warrants discussion - sensitivity to which model is improved least/most and why? I guess Figure 1 shows the answer to some extent, but an extra sentence here would be in place. SVM Separation: I was expecting the signal-vs-background separation to be much better, especially given the ST in Figure 1. Why is the SVM ~independent of ST ? Is this by construction ? L215-218: Is any systematic uncertainty assigned for the (in)stability of the results in the neighborhood of the SVM>0.63 threshold? L235-239: How are these 16 analytical functions chosen, and why 16? Is there some physically motivated parametrization or are these purely empirical? Also, is the “best” function selected based on the Chi2, or another metric? The associated 50% uncertainty for ST>5.2 TeV seems quite large, so this could be discussed in more detail L283: Do all 16 of these functions lead to acceptable fits in the CR ? Do you throw out those where the Prob(X2, nDoF) < 5% ? L287: Can you add an explanation of how this form and size of the uncertainty was assessed ? Figure 7: Are the limits for STmin>7 TeV ~flat because there’s no events with ST>7 TeV in Figure 6? I’m not sure if it makes much sense to include this range in the plots then. L321-325: The rather dramatic contribution (60%) to the improvement of model-dependent results from the updated PDF deserves more emphasis/explanation than ¼ sentence Figure 11 (left) Why not extend this plot to 0 ?

Type A comments:

L27 There are three types of objects discussed above: black holes, string balls and sphalerons L28: The shared properties are true(both BH and sphalerons have B/L-violating) However, “shared properties … high-multiplicity final states that violate baryon and lepton number conservation” mixes two different mechanisms. For sphalerons, high multiplicity follows directly from the B/L-violating transition, whereas for mini–black holes it is mainly due to thermal Hawking radiation. It might consider separating these points to avoid suggesting that B/L violation is the source of high multiplicity for black holes. L56-61: Why mention the resolutions specifically for 1<pT<10 GeV, when the analysis only uses objects with pT>70 GeV? Figure 1, 2, 10, 12: The lines for the different signal hypotheses are impossible to distinguish. Do we really need so many lines (in the first 2 figures)? Please consider removing a few, or using different colors/styles. L131: “leptons” includes “muons”, should we replace “leptons” -> “electrons”? L170: “jet rapidity” -> “jet pseudorapidity” Figure 11: Could we add markers at n=2,4,6 to indicate limits are not explicitly set for n=3,5? Is the interpolation for n=3,5 valid? Ref 60: Correct formatting of “sqrts” and add report number.