Learning more about particle collisions with machine learning

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland became famous around the world in 2012 with the detection of the Higgs boson. The observation marked a crucial confirmation of the Standard Model of particle physics, which organizes the subatomic particles into groups similar to elements in the periodic table from chemistry. The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has made many pivotal contributions to the construction and operation of the ATLAS experimental detector at the LHC and to the analysis of signals recorded by the detector that uncover the underlying physics of particle collisions. Argonne is now playing a lead role in the high-luminosity upgrade of the ATLAS detector for operations that are planned to begin in 2027. To that end, a team of Argonne physicists and computational scientists has devised a machine learning-based algorithm that approximates how the present detector would respond to the greatly increased data expected with the upgrade.