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AI Agents Can Autonomously Perform Experimental High Energy Physics (arxiv.org)
3 points by KolenCh 194 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Give an AI agent a particle dataset, working tools, and past papers, with other agents checking its work, and it runs the analysis from selecting events to writing the paper. It reproduced a known Higgs result and made a new measurement on collider data.

Abstract · AI Agents Can Already Autonomously Perform Experimental High Energy Physics

Large language model-based AI agents are now able to autonomously execute substantial portions of a high energy physics (HEP) analysis pipeline with minimal expert-curated input. Given access to a HEP dataset, an execution framework, and a corpus of prior experimental literature, we find that Claude Code succeeds in automating all stages of a typical analysis: event selection, background estimation, uncertainty quantification, statistical inference, and paper drafting. We argue that the experimental HEP community is underestimating the current capabilities of these systems, and that most proposed agentic workflows are too narrowly scoped or scaffolded to specific analysis structures. We present a proof-of-concept framework, Just Furnish Context (JFC), that integrates autonomous analysis agents with literature-based knowledge retrieval and multi-agent review, and show that this is sufficient to plan, execute, and document a credible high energy physics analysis. We demonstrate this by conducting analyses on open data from ALEPH, DELPHI, and CMS to perform electroweak, QCD, and Higgs boson measurements. We present two of those results in a condensed short paper form -- a CMS Run1 Open Data $H\to τ^+τ^-$ to demonstrate performance on a well-established result, and the first Lund plane measurement on LEP data -- a genuinely novel result and, to our knowledge, the first produced autonomously by an AI agent. Rather than replacing physicists, these tools promise to offload the repetitive technical burden of analysis code development, freeing researchers to focus on physics insight, truly novel method development, and rigorous validation. Given these developments, we advocate for new strategies for how the community trains students, organizes analysis efforts, and allocates human expertise.

Eric A. Moreno, Samuel Bright-Thonney, Andrzej Novak, Dolores Garcia, Philip Harris
arXiv:2603.20179 · hep-ex, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Mar 20, 2026 · updated Jun 20, 2026
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This is uniquely interesting to me because humongous amount of data are produced in HEP so automatic research (data analysis) in that domain is I think a huge enabler. It makes trying out ideas much cheaper (in human time) and you could flag interesting results for humans to investigate further. One deal breaker is because big data is so big in HEP, current operations are already very storage and compute bound. If only we can raise trillions of dollars in HEP and perhaps join force with ESA and build a fleet of data centers in space.