Discovery Mondays "Particle collisions - searching for a needle in a haystack"

Simulation of a collision in the ALICE detector.

One of the great challenges facing the LHC experiments is how to find an interesting "needle" interaction in a "haystack" of data. The accelerator will generate up to 600 million proton collisions per second. Although the frequency of lead-ion collisions in the ALICE detector will be lower, ten times more data will be generated than in proton-proton collisions since each ion contains 82 protons and 126 neutrons. Each collision will produce, on average, 40,000 particles, so in the space of one month the experiment will potentially accumulate up to one petabyte (10¹⁵ bytes) of data! But the key question is how do you go about sorting, selecting and processing such colossal quantities of information? This challenge will be met by a state-of-the-art data acquisition, transmission, storage and processing chain. Come to the next Discovery Monday to find out about all the links in this ground-breaking chain.

The event will be conducted in French and will take place in the Microcosm (Reception, Building 33, Meyrin site)
Monday, 3 December from 7.30 p.m. to 9.00 p.m.
Entrance Free

http://www.cern.ch/LundisDecouverte/