Particle physicists team up with AI to solve toughest science problems

Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator at the European particle physics lab CERN, produce about a million gigabytes of data every second. Even after reduction and compression, the data amassed in just one hour is similar to the data volume Facebook collects in an entire year – too much to store and analyze. Luckily, particle physicists don't have to deal with all of that data all by themselves. They partner with a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning that learns how to do complex analyses on its own. A group of researchers, including scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, summarize current applications and future prospects of machine learning in particle physics in a paper published today in Nature.