At CERN’s along the French-Swiss border, discovering new physics involves accelerating and smashing together beams of particles. These experiments have uncovered new particles, like the Higgs boson, and future experiments promise even more smashing revelations.

But to make these discoveries, scientists must meticulously comb through data on billions of particle collisions to find those rare, “interesting” and never-before-seen events that could reveal new layers to the of particle physics — or upend it entirely. Data analysis on such a scale is already no easy task: Within a decade, after upgrades to the LHC boost its data-collection capacity by up to a factor of 100, it will overwhelm today’s software tools and algorithms.

To create the cyberinfrastructure needed to support the next generation of high-energy physics research, on Sept. 4 the National Science Foundation the creation of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics, or IRIS-HEP. The institute, to be based at , is a coalition of 17 research institutions, including the 91̽»¨, and will receive $25 million from the NSF over five years.

“The primary goal of this institute is to change the way we look at data analysis in particle physics,” said 91̽»¨physics professor , who serves as deputy director of the institute.

IRES-HEP will develop computing software and expertise to enable a new era of discovery at the Geneva-based LHC, which is the world’s most powerful physics experiment.

Over the next eight years, the LHC will receive a series of major upgrades to sensors and other instruments known as the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider project, or HL-LHC. The HL-LHC experiments will look for dark matter, and more generally, search for new particles, interactions and physical principles. The $25 million funding over five years for IRES-HEP will drive innovations in data analysis and algorithms essential to handling the massive amounts of data generated by the HL-LHC.

“This is really big data with a capital B-I-G,” said , director of the institute and a senior computational physicist at Princeton University. “This huge increase in data is needed to find the extremely rare ‘needle in a haystack’ signals that could indicate the presence of new physics phenomena. But to fully explore this data, we need much more powerful software tools and algorithms. We also need to maximally exploit the evolving high-performance computing landscape and new tools like machine learning, in which computers study existing data sets to learn rules that they can apply to new data and new situations.”

Projects at IRES-HEP will include developing machine-learning methods to process data from HL-LHC experiments, novel data-storage systems, techniques to transfer collision data from Switzerland to partner institutions across the globe, and algorithms to analyze data provided by different instruments in the collider. 91̽»¨research within IRES-HEP will focus on distributive computing, a computational approach that divides a task or problem among multiple computers to solve it faster. Institute funds will help support several 91̽»¨doctoral students or postdoctoral researchers in these endeavors, Watts said.

“These upgrades to the LHC are the equivalent of improving the resolving factor of a microscope by a factor of 10 or 100,” said Watts. “Now, we need to upgrade the camera and image processing to account for that better data — and that is where the research at IRES-HEP comes in.”

Together, these efforts are expected to prepare physicists for 2026, when the HL-LHC upgrades are expected to be completed and the collider can then produce 100 times more collision events than it can today.

“With these new analysis tools in place when the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider experiments begin, we’ll be ready when the data start to roll in,” said Watts. “Then, we can let physicists concentrate on physics, and not have to worry about the computer science.”

In addition to the 91̽»¨and Princeton, the IRIS-HEP project will include participants from Cornell University; Indiana University; MIT; New York University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Chicago; the University of Cincinnati; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the University of Michigan; the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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For more information, contact Watts at gwatts@uw.edu.

Adapted from by Princeton University.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European research facility, on June 2 started recording data from the highest-energy particle collisions ever achieved on Earth.

Its operators announced they had achieved “stable beams,” or trains of proton bunches moving at almost the speed of light around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring of the collider — the signal that they can begin taking data.

This new proton collision data, the first recorded since 2012, will enable an international collaboration of researchers — including many from the 91̽»¨ — to study the Higgs boson, search for dark matter and develop a more complete understanding of the laws of nature.

“Together with collaborators from around the world, scientists from roughly a hundred U.S. universities and laboratories are exploring a previously unreachable realm of nature,” said James Siegrist, the U.S. Department of Energy’s associate director of science for high-energy physics. “We are very excited to be part of the international community that is pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe.”

Members of the 91̽»¨team are physics faculty members , , , and , post-doctoral researchers Emma Torró, Nikos Romotis and Lynn Marx and graduate students Heather Russell, Rachel Rosten, Pedro De Bruin and Nikola Whallon. The graduate students and post-doctoral researchers are currently working at CERN.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, reproduces conditions similar to those that existed immediately after the Big Bang.

In 2012, during the collider’s first run, — a fundamental particle that helps explain why certain elementary particles have mass. U.S. scientists represent about 20 percent and 30 percent, respectively, of the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, the two international teams that co-discovered the Higgs boson. Hundreds of U.S. scientists played vital roles in the Higgs discovery and will continue to study its remarkable properties.

Scientists will use the new data to pin down properties of the Higgs boson and search for new physics and phenomena such as dark matter particles — an invisible form of matter that makes up 25 percent of the entire mass and energy of the universe.

Physicists will also endeavor to answer questions like: Why is there more matter than antimatter? Why is the Higgs boson so light? Are there additional types of Higgs particles? What did matter look like immediately after the Big Bang?

The collider was turned off in early 2013 and engineers spent two years preparing the machine to collide particles at a much higher energy and intensity. During the shutdown U.S. scientists and their international collaborators installed several new components in the four LHC detectors, including components for the ATLAS detector designed and fabricated by the 91̽»¨team.

These components, together with other upgrades, will allow physicists to record more information about the particles produced during the high-energy collisions.

“The 91̽»¨ is a key player, in the sense that we contributed enormously to the design and fabrication of the ATLAS detector at the beginning,” said Lubatti. “And we have recently contributed a new detector that will enhance our ability to make discoveries by making measurements very close to the collision point of the protons.

“Having a measurement so close to the collision point greatly increases our ability to identify particles that may be indicators leading to new discoveries. This will enhance our understanding of the fundamental interactions that define the building blocks of matter in the universe,” said Lubatti, who will soon join his colleagues in Geneva, Switzerland.

“The first three-year run of the LHC, which culminated with major discovery in July 2012, was only the start of our journey. It is time for new physics!” said Rolf Heuer, CERN director-general, in a . “We have seen first data beginning to flow. Let’s see what they will reveal to us about how our universe works.”

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For more information, contact Lubatti at 206-962-1602 or .