Brown physicist awarded prestigious Department of Energy grant for research at Large Hadron Collider

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - Loukas Gouskos, an assistant professor of physics at Brown University, has been awarded a prestigious Early Career Award from the Department of Energy. With the $850,000 award, Gouskos and his research team will work to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools for use in analyzing data at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

Specifically, Gouskos' work aims to bolster scientists' understanding of the Higgs boson, the particle responsible for giving elementary particles like quarks and charged leptons their mass.

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012 was a landmark moment in particle physics. The particle, predicted by several theorists including the late Brown University professor Gerald Guralnik, was considered to be the final missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. But its discovery, in which Brown researchers also made key contributions, led to new questions about the particle's role in the formation of the universe as scientists currently understand it.

"The Higgs boson is a truly unique particle; we have never observed anything like it in nature," Gouskos said. "One of the most fascinating open questions in particle physics is whether it interacts with itself, and what that could tell us about the early universe. This is an incredibly rare process, and measuring it demands innovation in both data analysis and detector instrumentation - exactly what this award allows us to develop."

With the award funding, Gouskos and his group will bring state-of-the-art AI tools to bear in searching for Higgs boson pairs in LHC collision data. Collisions at the LHC produce an enormous volume of data. Of the billions of collisions recorded, only a tiny fraction produces Higgs boson pairs, and those rare events are buried in a vast sea of background noise. The tools that Gouskos and his team are creating will help separate signal from background, and could help in understanding the role that the Higgs played in the formation of the cosmos.

For example, understanding if and how Higgs particles interact with each other could reveal the role the particle might have played in tipping the balance between matter and antimatter in the early universe. The way the Higgs interacts with itself could determine whether conditions in the young universe favoured matter over antimatter, and ultimately why there's more of the former than the latter. In other words, the Higgs could be intimately involved in why there is something in the universe rather than nothing.

"With this award, we will develop AI tools and detector instrumentation that give us the potential to reach one of the biggest milestones in fundamental physics a decade sooner than expected," Gouskos said. "These tools won't just serve this one measurement but also open up entirely new opportunities to understand nature at its most fundamental scale."