• Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars

March 3, 2026 2:00 PM
PAIS 3205

Host:

Svende Braun

Presenter:

Cesar Luis Da Silva (LANL)

While the Standard Model has been repeatedly demonstrated to be incredibly successful, it turns out that the theory of strong forces—Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)—predicts some truly bizarre forms of matter that we've barely begun to explore. We're talking about "exotic" particles like glueballs (made entirely of elementary gluon particles that holds protons together!), tetraquarks (four quarks pretending to be one particle), and even stranger objects called oderons and gluon condensates. These aren't just theoretical curiosities—there's tantalizing evidence they might actually exist. The problem? They're incredibly hard to find and may require another level of sophistication on particle detector design, data processing and analysis techniques.

 Enter artificial intelligence. This seminar will take you inside the cutting edge of experimental particle physics, where researchers are smashing heavy nuclei together at near-light speeds to create extreme conditions where exotic particles might appear. You'll see how AI tools—from boosted decision trees to sophisticated graph neural networks—are becoming the new "eyes" of particle physics, learning to spot patterns in detector data that humans never could, and helping us identify not just particles but their entire surrounding environment.

If you've ever wondered what machine learning can do beyond image recognition and chatbots, come see it hunting for new forms of matter at the edge of the known universe.