First Colloquium of the Year: Sep 8, 2025

Harvard Physics Colloquium
Monday, September 8, 2025, @ 4:30 PM

Isobel Ojalvo (Princeton University)

"EXPECTING THE UNEXPECTED AT THE ENERGY FRONTIER"

As the LHC moves into its high-luminosity era, discovery potential will hinge not just on data volume, but on the intelligence of real-time selection systems. The CMS experiment processes petabytes of data every second, using an FPGA-based trigger system to identify rare signatures amid overwhelming backgrounds. Recent advances incorporate unsupervised machine learning to flag anomalous events within nanoseconds. This talk highlights recent developments in trigger-level anomaly detection—including FPGA-deployed autoencoders, graph networks, and quantized transformers—and outlines how these technologies enable scalable, model-driven and model-independent searches at the HL-LHC and future colliders. 
 

Isobel Ojalvo has been a member of the CMS collaboration since 2011. She led the team that achieved the first observation of the Higgs boson decaying to tau leptons using data from a single experiment at the LHC. Currently, her research focuses on the search for new physics at CMS, leveraging model-agnostic machine learning techniques embedded directly into the trigger and data acquisition system.