Silvio DONATO

Leader of Task 3.3 (Data Compression)

I joined the CMS Collaboration in 2012 during my Master’s, just in time for the Higgs boson discovery. Since then, my work has been a mix of physics analysis, software, and real-time data selection. For many years, I focused on the CMS High Level Trigger (HLT), the system that go through 30 million proton collisions every second to decide which ones are worth keeping.

More recently, I’ve been working on “HLT scouting.” This is a clever way to save data by creating a smaller, highly compressed version of an event directly at the trigger level. It allows us to go beyond the usual data limits and look for rare, low-mass particles that we would otherwise miss.

In terms of physics, I’ve spent a lot of time searching for the Higgs boson (specifically when it decays into bottom quarks) and looking for new particles. On the technical side, I’ve had the chance to serve as the CMS Trigger Coordinator and as the Release Manager for our software framework, cmssw.

These days, I’m part of the NextGen Triggers project, where I lead the work on Data Compression & Reduction (Task 3.3).

Fields of interest:

• Trigger
• Reconstruction
• Data Compression
• Data Reduction
• High Level Trigger
• GPU
• Higgs Physics
• Beyond Standard Model searches