Jefferson Lab’s search for a mysterious subatomic particle gets some help from Department of Energy grant

Jefferson Lab’s search for smaller-than-an-atom bits of matter that nobody has spotted but that theory says exist is getting some help with crunching through the reams of data its GlueX detector has collected.

The help comes in the form of a U.S. Department of Energy grant to staff scientist Alexander Austregesilo. He is one of 83 scientists who won a DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program grant, which average $2.5 million over five years.

Austregesilo works on the Newport News-based Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility’s GlueX research into the strong force — one of the four basic forces of nature, with gravity, electromagnetism and the so-called weak force, which is what drives particle decay, as with radioactivity.

The strong force binds quarks, the subatomic particles with fractional electric charges, into the protons and neutrons of atoms’ nuclei — as well as some other, mysterious particles called exotic mesons. They’re made up of both fewer and more quarks than protons or neutrons and are what GlueX focuses on finding.

“We want to further our understanding of the dynamics of the strong interaction,” Austregesilo said.

“GlueX was designed to look for more exotic states of matter. You may find four or five quarks together. You can also have excited gluons, which contribute to the properties of the particle,” he said.

Since 2016, the GlueX experiment has amassed 4 million gigabytes of data — a gigabyte contains the same amount of information as nearly 900,000 pages of text — from powering photons of light onto atomic nuclei with a 12 billion electron-volt particle accelerator.

Austregesilo’s project focuses on developing tools to search in that data for signs of those mysterious mesons.

“It’s so much data and so precise that old techniques just are not enough anymore,” he said. “With the high-performance computing resources and advances in theory that are available now, you have to develop new tools and new methods to extract as much information as you can from the data that we recorded.”

He aims to use computer systems powered primarily by graphics processing units, or GPUs, more powerful versions of the units that run popular video gaming systems.

Austregesilo expects to employ advanced programming methods, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, to get the GPUs to look for the very small signals the mesons would emit.

Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com