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