Dennis Perepelitsa

Physics faculty awarded Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission funding for AI-based projects

Kirsten Apodaca — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:02:50 +0000

Physics faculty awarded Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission funding for AI-based projects Kirsten Apodaca Tue, 08/18/2026 - 09:02

Kirsten Apodaca

Six physics faculty from Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder are leading or contributing to new projects awarded more than $1.6 million in highly competitive U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission grants, the agency announced on July 22. Nationwide, only 278 phase-one projects were funded out of over 5,000 proposals.

Yuan Shi and Keith Ulmer are principal investigators on their respective projects, Dennis Perepelitsa is a co-principal investigator on two projects, Jamie Nagle is a co-principal investigator on another, and Xun Gao and Scott Parker are collaborators on the project led by Shi.

The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia, and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.

“Having six Ģ��Ӱ�� Physics faculty involved across four Genesis Mission projects is incredibly impressive,” says Tobin Munsat, professor and chair of physics. “This reflects the broad strength of our department and demonstrates how our faculty are leading the way in putting AI and quantum technologies to work on some of the most challenging questions in fundamental science.”

AI for analyzing particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider

Ulmer, with collaborators from the University of California San Diego, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University, will use AI to analyze largely untapped datasets of particle collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

Each day, the LHC produces about 4,000 petabytes, or 4 billion gigabytes, of particle collision data used by physicists around the world to better understand the fundamental nature of the universe. Because of the enormous amount of data, current analyses are limited to roughly one in every 10,000 particle collisions, leaving potential anomalies undetected.

By combining high-energy physics expertise, data science, and industry AI methods, Ulmer and his collaborators will develop a system capable of analyzing the full dataset from the LHC. Called the AI-Inclusive Discovery of Anomalies in Scouting (AIDA-Scout), the system will analyze data in real time, automatically adjust to changing detector conditions, and find anomalies in collision data that could lead to new scientific discoveries.

Using quantum computing technologies and AI to simulate plasma for fusion pilot plants

Shi is leading a project to generate plasma simulations needed for fusion pilot plants. Collaborators on the project include Gao and Parker, as well as colleagues from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Infleqtion.

Even today’s most powerful supercomputers cannot produce certain plasma simulations essential for developing fusion pilot plants.

The team will develop new computational methods combining quantum computing, quantum machine learning, and AI to create more efficient and accurate simulations needed for fusion to become a potential energy source.

“This project seeks to prepare the fusion community for the coming generation of quantum computers by creating algorithms and software that can take advantage of quantum hardware as it matures,” says Shi. “The resulting capabilities could significantly accelerate plasma simulations, supporting advances in fusion energy science and scientific computing.”

AI for understanding quark-gluon plasma

Some of the final collisions captured by the sPHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a nuclear physics research facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory. (Image Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)

A project led by Baruch College, City University of New York involves Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder physics faculty Jamie Nagle and Dennis Perepelitsa as co-principal investigators. The project’s leadership team includes Yeonju Go, a former postdoctoral researcher in Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder’s experimental nuclear physics group.

The project is designed to better understand the quark-gluon plasma, a phase of matter which only existed microseconds after the Big Bang at temperatures exceeding two trillion Kelvin. At Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists recreate tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma by colliding gold nuclei together at nearly the speed of light. These collisions are analyzed by the sPHENIX detector, which acts as a giant camera, capturing approximately 15,000 particle collisions each second.

When creating the quark-gluon plasma, sometimes there are two high energy quarks that scatter, and this project aims to separate and analyze these specific images by using an unsupervised AI framework known as cycle-consistent generative learning.

“We know how quarks scatter at high energy, but we want to understand how they scatter when they’re inside the plasma,” says Nagle.

AI for enhancing the foundation model for nuclear and particle physics

Dennis Perepelitsa is a co-principal investigator on a project led by colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed at enhancing the Foundation Model for Nuclear and Particle Physics (FM4NPP), a large-scale AI model built to extract scientific insights directly from raw detector data.

Foundation models go beyond the more commonly known large language models (LLMs) by being able to perform a variety of tasks. The project will extend the current FM4NPP, which only includes information from one sPHENIX detector subsystem, to include a variety of other detectors, making the model truly multi-modal and enhancing the capability of the detector for quark-gluon plasma measurements. Ultimately, the FM4NPP effort is envisioned as a multi-institution consortium between national labs, universities, and industry to accelerate scientific discovery in a broad set of nuclear and particle physics datasets.

“In modern collider detectors, physics processes leave signatures in multiple subsystems at once, and a comprehensive picture is needed for the highest scientific sensitivity. The foundation model is based on similar principles as commercial LLMs, which is that with enough data and scale, it can make connections beyond the existing non-AI approaches,” says Perepelitsa.

View the Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder press release

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Ģ��Ӱ�� Physics Professors Perepelitsa, Nagle, and Graduate Students Build New Detector Components for Brookhaven National Laboratory

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 21:05:10 +0000

Ģ��Ӱ�� Physics Professors Perepelitsa, Nagle, and Graduate Students Build New Detector Components for Brookhaven National Laboratory Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/09/2021 - 15:05

View the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) news feature, "sPHENIX Assembly Shifts into Visible High Gear" which describes the work scientists and collaborators—including nuclear physics Professors Dennis Perepelitsa, Jamie Nagle, and a team of four graduate students—are doing to build and test components for sPHENIX, a 1000-ton particle detector housed at BNL.

Also check out two BNL feature articles profiling Ģ��Ӱ�� Graduate Students Berenice Garcia and Jeff Ouellette. Garcia and Ouellette are members of the graduate student team who are assembling sectors of the outer hadronic calorimeter for the new sPHENIX detector.

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Dennis Perepelitsa Named DOE Early Career Award Winner

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 19:19:20 +0000

Dennis Perepelitsa Named DOE Early Career Award Winner Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/08/2017 - 13:19

Assistant Professor Dennis Perepelitsa of the University of Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder Physics Department will receive a five-year, $750,000 grant as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Award program, for his proposal entitled “Searching for Parton Energy Loss in Quark-Gluon Plasma Droplets.”

There were 59 awards selected on peer review from 700 proposals. Professor Perepelitsa was the sole awardee from Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder in 2017. He joins several previous DOE Early Career winners in the department: Ivan Smalyukh (2013), Paul Romatschke (2012), Minhyea Lee (2011), Michael Hermele (2010), Alysia Marino (2010), and Tobin Munsat (2010).

Data for Perepelitsa’s research is collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. At this international facility, heavy nuclei are accelerated to near the speed of light and brought into collision, creating a “quark-gluon plasma” — a miniature version of the primordial matter that comprised the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. These collisions are analyzed with the ATLAS detector, a 7000 ton, 46 meter long experiment situated underground in the LHC tunnels, with an experimental collaboration consisting of thousands of scientists around the world. Professor Perepelitsa’s research seeks to determine how high-energy particles are affected by quark-gluon plasma regions they encounter. Perepelitsa is also involved in the development of the sPHENIX experiment, a new detector being designed and built at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S.

“I am grateful for this recognition and encouragement by the broader scientific community,” Perepelitsa said. “The financial award represents a crucial investment right as I am starting to develop my research program in experimental nuclear physics at Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder.”

“We are excited to have Assistant Professor Perepelitsa honored with a DOE Early Career Award,” Physics Department Chair John Cumalat said. “These awards recognize the excellence of young faculty who quickly become international leaders in their research field.”

Dennis Perepelitsa earned his PhD in Physics from Columbia University in 2014 and performed postdoctoral work at Brookhaven National Laboratory as a Goldhaber Distinguished Fellow. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Ģ��Ӱ�� in August 2016. He has won multiple awards including the Goldhaber Distinguished Fellowship in 2013, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven Thesis Award in 2014, the ATLAS (CERN) Thesis Award 2014, and the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science Lee Grodzins Postdoctoral Prize in 2016.

The Early Career Research Program, now in its eighth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work. A full list of selectees can be found at: https://science.energy.gov/early-career/.

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National Nuclear Physics School 2017 Hosted in Boulder

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 21:59:20 +0000

National Nuclear Physics School 2017 Hosted in Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/08/2017 - 15:59

The University of Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder hosted the National Nuclear Physics Summer School on campus from July 9-22, 2017. This is an annual two-week series of lectures for graduate students and postdoctoral research scientists in nuclear physics, and is funded by the National Science Foundation. Each summer the school is in a different location, and this year the University of Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder nuclear physics group, consisting of Professors Ed Kinney, Jamie Nagle, Dennis Perepelitsa, and Paul Romatschke, applied and were selected to host the school. The school was expertly coordinated by Emily Flanagan of the Physics Department.

The school hosted 50 students from all over the country and even the world - from as far away as Chile, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, and Armenia, along with 15 lecturers drawn from nuclear physics experts all over the country. Lecture topics covered all areas of nuclear physics from nuclear medicine to neutron star physics, stockpile stewardship, the science of fundamental particles, and more. The nuclear physics faculty at the University of Ģ��Ӱ�� Boulder study the sub-atomic structure of the proton and the properties of matter that existed at the ultra-high temperatures in the earliest stages of the Universe. Their research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. These topics were a particular highlight and area of discussion between students and lecturers.

Every year, approximately 100 Ph.D.s in the United States are awarded in nuclear physics. For these 50 students, the school represents a vibrant way to explore the broad program of nuclear physics research in our country, and learn about the research conducted in the Physics Department here in Boulder.

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Brookhaven National Laboratory Receives Approval for Upgraded sPHENIX Detector

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 18:43:03 +0000

Brookhaven National Laboratory Receives Approval for Upgraded sPHENIX Detector Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/01/2017 - 11:43

View the BNL Press Release

Brookhaven National Laboratory has announced that the U.S. Department of Energy recently granted "Critical Decision-Zero" (CD-0) status to the sPHENIX project, a proposed upgrade of the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). This decision paves the way for building a ground-breaking research tool which would have "unprecedented precision for tracking subatomic interactions."

Ģ��Ӱ�� Physics Professors Jamie Nagle and Dennis Perepelitsa are research leaders in the new sPHENIX project, and Prof. Nagle previously served as a Co-Spokesperson of the PHENIX detector, which completed its data-taking mission in June 2016. Charged with exploring the interactions between the smallest building blocks of matter, PHENIX parsed collision data from RHIC to study the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, a four-trillion degree primordial soup of fundamental particles thought to have existed microseconds after the
creation of the universe.

The sPHENIX detector will be a significant upgrade to the original PHENIX project. It utilizes a superconducting solenoid magnet repurposed from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), along with state-of-the-art charged-particle-tracking detectors and new electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters to greatly enhance the experimental capabilities sPHENIX, allowing it to measure particle jets produced in collisions at RHIC with unparalleled precision and speed.

The solenoid magnet that will form the core of the sPHENIX detector

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Physics Professor Dennis Perepelitsa wins Lee Grodzins Postdoctoral Award

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 23:13:09 +0000

Physics Professor Dennis Perepelitsa wins Lee Grodzins Postdoctoral Award Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/24/2016 - 17:13

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