AI-powered algorithm sheds new light on the nature of the universe’s most energetic particles
The Pierre Auger Observatory, with a size of 3000 km², is the world’s largest experiment for studying nature’s most energetic particles: ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. Using artificial intelligence (AI), researchers have unlocked novel insights into the mass composition of these particles, paving the way for a deeper understanding of their origins and the extreme environments that birth them. The research was led by Dr. Jonas Glombitza, a postdoctoral researcher at ECAP, and has been recently published in Physical Review Letters.
This innovative technique, based on deep neural networks, has allowed for the most comprehensive study of the mass composition at ultra-high energies by exploiting the potential of the surface detector for cosmic ray reconstructions. Collecting the same amount of statistics using traditional detectors, i.e., fluorescence telescopes would have taken 150 years, as opposed to 10 years using the novel approach.
The research has been mainly performed at the RWTH Aachen University and the Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics. Feel free to listen to a podcast (https://www.auger.org/images/podcasts/PRL_podcast_xmax_dnn.mp3) discussing this recent breakthrough.
Learn more about the work published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 021001 and the detailed article published in Phys. Rev. D 111, 022003.
Additional resources:
Disclaimer
The image has been AI-generated using Microsoft Designer, which is licensed for non-commercial use. The podcast has been AI-generated using https://notebooklm.google.com and serves as an entertaining way to learn more about the research in a popular scientific way only. Therefore, it has only limited scientific accuracy. For details, please refer to the publications.