Dr. Steven Schramm awarded an ERC Starting Grant

Dr. Steven Schramm of the Department of Nuclear and Corpuscular Physics (DPNC) has obtained an ERC Starting Grant providing funding of up to € 1.5 million over five years, for the DISCOVERHEP project (Turning noise into data: a discovery strategy for new weakly-interacting physics). The project will search for rare new physics produced in proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, as recorded by the ATLAS Experiment.

The project will center around using the large ATLAS dataset in a new way: rather than focusing on the primary proton-proton collision that causes a given “event” to be recorded, all of the additional lower-energy collisions that occur at the same time are used instead. Dedicated analysis of these additional collisions, typically viewed as noise and thus discarded, can provide an enormous dataset with the potential for the discovery of a wide range of rare new “hadronic” physics processes. These analysis techniques will include both traditional approaches as well as more modern developments from the field of data science.

Dr. Schramm has been a member of the DPNC since 2015. He is a leading expert in the ATLAS Collaboration, is currently the leader of the 200-person group dedicated to hadronic physics characterization in ATLAS, and was previously the ATLAS founder and coordinator of the CERN inter-experimental machine learning group (2015-2018). He will now use this opportunity to put together a small group exploiting his background in both hadronic physics and machine learning to look for new physics hiding in this novel dataset.