I am spending a good amount of time this summer at the University of Bonn. Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, is now just another 330k inhabitants city but has retained a wonderful flair of a capital: Major museums, a number of massive former government buildings and monuments that make it stick out while at the same time offering all the advantages of a smaller city.
The physics institute located in the Nußallee 12 is right now under heavy renovation and has been temporarily moved to the Rotationsgebäude in Käthe-Kümmel Straße 1. This building is completely new and while it is somewhat less of a old school physics flair, it is a very spacious and modern building that makes it a pleasure to work there.
Professor Dr. Matthias Schott is my sponsor and we are also working closely with Professor Dr. Lucie Flek (Computer Science). The key topics are electroweak precision physics and the use of agentic AI to perform general high energy physics analysis.
The first week of our Agentic AI workshop was very counterintuitively a week of classical analysis work doing a physics analysis that has never been done before and that we would redo in the second part of the workshop and see how well the agent can deal with this challenge. We looked for diffractive Z boson production in CMS Open Data. This topic was carefully chosen because:
- it has not been done before (agents will not know about it),
- it is small enough that it can be completed rather quickly,
- it is doable on CMS Open Data so ATLAS and CMS people can work together, and
- most importantly our electroweak precision measurements might suffer from diffractive vector boson production that we so far do not account for, thus a potential systematic uncertainty
The workshop was a week of intense discussion and some good work on the carefully prepared data. The results will hopefully soon be posted as a little paper. The workshop participants met and several photos were taken to make sure everybody would eventually be together. We never succeeded but photoshop and AI might make a nice photo out of it in the end. Professor Schott could never make it into the photo …
Visiting the Rheinlust Biergarten was one of the fun parts of the AI week. What a beautiful place to have a relaxed drink with friends.
We are looking forward to our next visit to Bonn … loosely planned for October.