On Tuesday August 12 at 10am (Los Angeles time), the AI for HEP community virtual seminar hosted by alphaXiv will be given by Science Synergy‘s Science Chair Dr. Noah Bray-Ali. The seminar proposes a new “frontier” for high-energy physics (HEP): the volume frontier. The four-dimensional luminous volume of the interaction point inside particle detectors at HEP colliders catches dark matter in the form of fundamental particles known as axions (See Dark Matter Makes Gluons Glue Better and Gluons Get Stickier When Big Bunches Meet), and artificial intelligence (AI) can help spot the effects of the axion dark matter on HEP measurements.
The main thing you see when you collide a pair of beams of protons near the speed of light is a stream of pions coming out along the beam directions. The pion stream is so bright that particle detectors searching for rare exotic new particles at HEP colliders would be totally blinded were it not for the carefully designed software and hardware “triggers” that simply throw away the pion events. Nevertheless, every once in a while, HEP colliders dip into the pion stream and generate the “dark” data of HEP.
AI for HEP thrives on such “dark” data. Searching for subtle correlations in the brightness of the pion stream, AI for HEP can pick out the effects of the luminous four-dimensional volume on the “cross-section” for making pions in proton-proton collisions. After all, HEP does not take place in a vacuum but in the local dark matter “halo” of the galaxy: AI for HEP can help catch dark matter at the volume frontier.