![\"spirals](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/shutterstock_editorial_1792830j.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
What does the search for the God particle at CERN look like? CGI imagery came up with the above. <\/p>\n
Copyright (C) 2026 Shutterstock Editorial. No Use Without Permission. <\/p>\n
Every second, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produces 40 million particle collisions \u2013 far more data than any computer on Earth could ever store or analyse. So CERN scientists are letting AI make split-second decisions, in real time, about which of those collisions might contain the next big discovery. It\u2019s one of many ways in which AI could transform particle physics work.\n<\/p>\n
Listen to the article <\/p>\n
Listening the article <\/p>\n
Toggle language selector <\/p>\n
English (US) <\/p>\n<\/li>\n
English (British) <\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Generated with artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n
This content was published on <\/p>\n
July 13, 2026 – 09:00\n<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/emiliano-feresin-profileImage-48322171.png\")
<\/p>\n
\n Originally from Italy, Emiliano has worked as science communicator in various European countries. Now in Switzerland, he writes about scientific discoveries, especially the ones having a chemical bond, and science policy, favoring the stories that have a human touch. His main question: How is academia evolving in a changing society? <\/p>\n
As CERN plans a new, far more expensive collider to replace the LHC in the 2040s, physicists say AI won\u2019t just crunch numbers after the fact\u2013 it will help design the machine itself, choose its materials, and decide what questions it\u2019s even built to ask.<\/p>\n
When scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory discovered the Higgs Boson\u00a0in 2012, it\u00a0was\u00a0a revolution in our understanding of the universe. The finding came after four decades of searching. And it\u00a0wouldn\u2019t\u00a0have been possible without machine learning algorithms, which were\u00a0\u201csomething like the\u00a0great-grandfather of what you now call AI,\u201d\u00a0says\u00a0Maurizio Pierini, a physicist at CERN.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today, the descendants of those algorithms are making inroads in all areas of particle physics. \u201cWe are going to use AI more and more,\u201d former CERN director Fabiola Gianotti told Swissinfo. Physicists, like scientists in other fields, are using AI before an experiment, to prepare it, and after an experiment, to analyse data. But at CERN, they are also pushing the technology into unexplored directions. \u201cWhat defines our specificity is that we also are deploying algorithms in the middle of the experiment, as part of the actual data taking,\u201d Pierini says.<\/p>\n
The future of CERN: a series <\/p>\n
The stories in this series look at where the world\u2019s largest particle physics laboratory stands in its scientific ambitions and its efforts to remain an international crossroads for understanding our universe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
CERN\u2019s new AI-based tools arrive as the Geneva-based institution is upgrading much of its physical equipment. This year, work will begin updating the LHC to a machine with higher collision rates, which means more data to analyse. Next, the lab must complete the design and obtain approval for a collider, called the Future Circular Collider (FCC), that will replace the LHC in the 2040s. CERN physicists interviewed for this story agree that AI could be instrumental not just in research and analysis, but in helping to design the new collider, keeping costs down, and attracting brilliant minds back to particle physics.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cThanks to AI, everything will be done differently: better, faster, more technologically advanced, and AI will help us probe the open questions in particle physics,\u201d says Maria Spiropulu, a particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology and a CERN collaborator.<\/p>\n
AI for the Higgs Boson<\/p>\n
The first use of machine learning at CERN was in 1987, when scientists developed a system to find faults in a machine called the Proton Synchrotron.<\/p>\n
Later on, CERN scientists used another AI ancestor to make use of the LHC. In the LHC, particles collide at energies of up to 13 trillion electron volts (TeV) and produce forty million collisions every second. Each collision results in traces that are picked up by detectors, giant machines that surround the LHC collision zones. The stream of data is so huge and fast that \u201cno computing infrastructure on this planet can handle it,\u201d Pierini says. \u201cYou need to filter the data, and you need to have an algorithm that decides what\u2019s interesting and what\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s exactly what happened when CERN was hunting for the Higgs Boson. The so-called God Particle gives mass to other particles, but it\u2019s rarely produced during a collision, and it exists only for a fleeting instant. Scientists, however, knew what they were looking for. Peter Higgs predicted the existence of the boson in the 1960s based on existing understandings of particle physics, and finding it was a matter of filtering the data to find evidence.<\/p>\n
To do this, researchers loaded machine learning algorithms onto the LHC\u2019s hardware and programmed it to look for traces that would be consistent with Peter Higgs\u2019s calculations. From the streams of data, the machine selected the most likely instances where a Higgs boson was produced. In the end, the algorithms could filter 1,000 signals per second, allowing for the first clear observations of the God Particle. \u201cThat\u2019s why we can say that AI helped the Higgs boson discovery,\u201d Pierini says.<\/p>\n
>>Science is not cheap, and CERN is no stranger to fights over funding:<\/strong><\/p>\n \n More<\/p>\n More <\/p>\n Research frontiers\n <\/p>\n Can CERN\u2019s $19bn effort to rewrite physics survive a fracturing world? <\/p>\n This content was published on <\/p>\n May 18, 2026 <\/p>\n The science behind CERN\u2019s proposed Future Circular Collider is settled, but the funding is not. <\/p>\n![\"CERN](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/000_A4HY4ZQ.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![\"space](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/709085840_highres.jpg\")
<\/p>\n