AI and particle physics: How do modern technology and science transform each other?

Particle physics – a science that studies the structure and properties of elementary particles and their interactions – contributes to the development of innovative technologies, which are subsequently used not only in this area, but also migrate to many others. The need for increasingly sophisticated instruments – particle detectors, complex colliders, and others – has fostered a symbiotic relationship between physics and technological advances over the last century. Tommaso Dorigo, an experimental physicist, first researcher at the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), a participant in the CMS experiment at CERN since 2001 and the SWGO experiment since 2022 expressed such opinion in an interview with NEWS.am Tech.

According to him, many innovative technologies, such as silicon detectors, were originally developed and used in the field of particle physics, but later they found application in other areas, such as in the production of smartphones and other devices that we use every day, and in the field of military industry etc.

Artificial intelligence, unlike many other technologies of recent decades, was not developed for elementary particle physics, but in this area, it is already widely used today, and its capabilities will only increase in the future.

“The development of AI technologies brings many benefits to a number of sciences, and particle physics is definitely one of them,” the specialist said.

Speed and discovering things beyond our imagination

As the specialist noted, in research in the field of basic sciences, advanced technologies are required to work with large amounts of data and to interpret them. AI in this case can contribute both to the acceleration of many works and research, and to new discoveries.

“I work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a huge machine that looks for the highest energy collisions. Deciphering the data we receive is very difficult because we have millions of electronic channels for each collision, and there are 40 million collisions per second inside these machines. When working with such large amounts of data, artificial intelligence tools can help – they can sort through the most interesting collisions, of which there are very few, and also discover new information, “new physics,” that we may not yet know anything about. This tool is called anomaly detection. With its help we look for things that are beyond our imagination. There are things that we, theorists, may not have come up with yet, and artificial intelligence can find them and draw our attention to them,” the specialist noted.

Artificial intelligence, as already noted, can also significantly speed up work and much research in the field of particle physics. In addition, with the help of AI, you can create copies of real data sets, work with them, and conduct various simulations based on them, which will help to better understand this data.

AI and physics in the future

In the future, as the scientist assures, AI will be used even more widely in the field of elementary particle physics. In particular, AI will be able to help in the development and design of various devices. For example, the construction of a collider is considered a serious challenge, because, as the specialist noted, these are the most complex machines imaginable, with hundreds of millions of electronic channels, hundreds of different subdetectors, and so on. AI, as the specialist is sure, can help simplify and speed up the development of such machines, optimize them, and so on.

Another question is that many scientists today, oddly enough, are quite conservative, and it is difficult to convince them to “change the paradigm”, abandon the usual approaches and adopt new ones, including starting to use AI in their work. This will take time.

Tommaso Dorigo is one of the speakers at the USERN international congress, which was held in Yerevan on November 8-10. The Congress is known for uniting science and art, allowing, with the help of art, to “translate” science into a “language” that is more understandable to the general public.