The Aidala group focuses on experimental studies of high-energy quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong nuclear interaction, working at the intersection of nuclear and particle physics. They work with petabyte-scale data sets and extensive global networks of distributed computing systems to study proton-proton and proton-nucleus collision data. Their data analysis techniques include machine learning and a variety of statistical methods. The data are produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York. Specifically, the Aidala group is part of two large, international collaborations involving hundreds of scientists: the LHC-beauty (LHCb) experiment at the LHC and the sPHENIX experiment at RHIC. The group is furthermore working toward the future Electron-Ion Collider, a next-generation facility focused on the study of QCD that is planned to start taking data at BNL in the early 2030s.
