Can Neural Networks Design The Detector Of A Future Particle Collider?

by Tommaso Dorigo

Casual reader, be warned – the contents of this article, specifically the second part of it, are highly volatile, speculative stuff. But hey, that is the stuff that dreams are made of. And I have one or two good reasons to dream on.


The environment

Machine Learning is ubiquitous today. Self-driving cars; self-shaving robots (just kidding, but I’m sure they can be constructed if the need arises); programs that teach themselves chess and become world-champion-class players overnight; Siri; google search engines; google translate – okay, I am going too far. But you know it: machine learning has become a player in almost

The L1 muon trigger algorithms

by Ioanna Papavergou

The last CMS week of the year was held two weeks ago, summarizing all the upgrades and changes that happened in 2017, but also the plans of the groups for 2018. Since my service work concerns the L1 muon trigger performance, I was asked by the data performance group conveners to give a talk about the muon trigger algorithms and the improvements that happened last year.

Summer activities at LIP-Lisbon

by Giles Strong

So, it’s been a while since my last post, apologies for that, but the summer has been both busy and eventful, so let me summarise what’s been happening.

«Es chulo», or «This night, I almost cried»

by Pietro Vischia

Today I had a very full day. It started with a working meeting (an informal meeting of the people working on some analysis) for planning how to improve the EWkino analysis (one of the searches for new physics we are involved in) with the new data CMS is taking. I then went on to the UniOvi CMS group weekly meeting, in which we all meet in the large common office (plus some people connected in videoconference from CERN) to discuss the various topics the group is involved it. Let me delay to another occasion my rant on the amount of CMS meetings we are subjected to!

Then, after some quick and frenetic coding work, I

CT-PPS Detector Alignment

by Giles Strong

Continuing on from my last post, in which I described part of the service work I am doing in the CMS experiment, I’ll now give an overview of the second project I work on, which takes place in the context of the CT-PPS sub-detector of the CMS experiment.

CT-PPS, located on both sides of the main bulk of CMS some 200 metres from the interaction point, stands for CMS-TOTEM Precision Proton Spectrometer. The experiment is a joint project

Tau Identification At CMS With Neural Networks

by Giles Strong

Both the CMS and ATLAS collaborations are pretty vast, with around 5000 qualified scientist between them, and even more members working towards qualification. Everyone listed as ‘qualified’ will be listed as an author on any publication the collaboration produces, regardless of who actually did the major work for the analysis.

Art & Science 27: Instant

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

The work named “Attimo” (or “instant” in English) was produced by Nicolò Doglioni, Filippo Dorigo, and Zeno Pogaznic from Liceo “Benedetti”. They were impressed by the pictures of the CMS detector and its components, and they decided to try and capture the symmetry of the detection elements in a way that makes it only apparent if you happen to end up in the correct line of sight.

The attached pictures show the construction, made of coloured wood

Art & Science 21: The Boson’s Tracks

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

Many of the high school students participating in the Art & Science contest in Venice took inspiration from the pictures of LHC collisions creating the Higgs boson, and attempted to produce a three-dimensional realization of what physicists only realize on their computer screens.

The work shown here, produced by Eleonora Perale and Camilla Longo, is probably the one of the lot that reproduces with most care one of the

Art & Science 10: RiveliAMO

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

An assembly of wooden circles installed one inside the other, containing plastic rods of different colour, is the work by Alice Giambini, Matteo Quaglio, and Olga Pintus of Liceo “Marco Foscarini”.

The students took inspiration from the fact that the CMS detector is composed of several layers, each of which has the main function of detecting and measuring a different kind of particle. So they reproduced schematically the concept by having different “cycles” connected to different particle tracks (the plastic rods). These