Nikos KONSTANTINIDIS

WP2.1 Task Co-lead

I am an experimental particle physicist and have been a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC since the early 2000’s.

In terms of physics analyses, I have been heavily involved in the search for Higgs pair-production, arguably one of the most exciting topics currently at the LHC, as well as the flagship process in the future High-Luminosity (HL-)LHC programme. The observation and study of Higgs pair-production will help elucidate the nature of electroweak phase transition, which happened around one picosecond after the Big Bang, and could provide fascinating insights about the evolution of the early universe, with possible answers to questions like the overwhelming dominance of matter over antimatter in nature today.

My technical interests and work have always been in fast pattern recognition (/ feature extraction) algorithms for use at the real-time event filtering (triggering) of events in collider experiments. I played a leading role in developing, optimizing and validating tracking algorithms for ATLAS in the earlier running periods of the LHC, and in the past few years, I have been concentrating on the ATLAS Global Hardware Trigger, a completely new system being built for the HL-LHC era. This work involves designing novel ultrafast machine-learning algorithms to be deployed on FPGAs for microsecond-scale feature extraction, with the aim of maximising the physics reach of ATLAS at the HL-LHC.