Scientific Computing Seminar
Spring 2008

Igor Volobouev
Department of Physics

Tuesday, 4/15/2008
4:00 -- 5:00 p.m.
Experimental Sciences Building, Room 120

"Accelerating Particle Discoveries Through Computation"


I will describe a modern data analysis method in High Energy Physics known as the "matrix element" approach. This method provides a tight coupling between theoretical models and experimental data, but until recently it has been considered impractical due to its extreme computational intensity.

The mathematical base of the matrix element approach consists in calculating high dimensional integrals over relativistic phase space of particle processes. I will highlight the key issues related to efficient evaluation of such integrals: optimal decomposition of the phase space according to the integrand structure, improving integral convergence using Quasi-Monte Carlo methods, fast modeling of particle detector response by modern nonparametric statistical techniques, and use of high performance computing facilities and the Grid for massive data processing.

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