Nikhef researcher Jos Vermaseren receives prestigious ERC Advanced Grant

17 december 2012

Amsterdam, 17 December 2012 – Dr. Jos Vermaseren, researcher in the theory group at Nikhef, has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). He will receive over € 1.7 million for his proposal “Solving High Energy Physics Equations using Monte Carlo Gaming Techniques – HEPGAME”. This is the third ERC Advanced Grant awarded to a Nikhef researcher in 2012.

Jos Vermaseren proposes to perform (hitherto impossible) calculations most of which are urgently needed to make optimal use of upcoming experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. In particle physics these quantum field theory calculations are needed for a detailed comparison between data and theory. It is therefore only natural to demand that the theoretical results be at least as accurate as the data. 

About the ERC Advanced Grants:

The ERC Advanced Grant is given to exceptional individual researchers to pursue cutting-edge ground-breaking projects that open new directions in their respective research fields or other domains.  Every year a few thousand applications are received by the European Research Council, of which only a few hundred are honoured. 

Earlier this year two ERC Advanced Grants were also awarded to Nikhef researchers Piet Mulders and Harry van der Graaf.
(News release Piet Mulders)
(News release Harry van der Graaf)

About the proposal:

The calculations Jos Vermaseren proposes have been intractable thus far due to their enormous demand of man and computer power.  Jos Vermaseren will make use of the brand new technique of Monte Carlo Tree Search from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and gaming to resolve this issue and to automatize the derivation of formulas and the construction of computer programs. This will be done in the framework of the (open source) computer algebra system FORM developed by Jos Vermaseren. The new technology will be made available for other researchers, enabling a wide range of calculations at a new level of precision.

Some aspects of this project will be worked out in collaboration with the Artificial Intelligence group of Prof. van den Herik and Prof. Plaat at the Tilburg University.

The grant will fund two postdoc positions for a duration of five years at Nikhef, and in addition two PhD positions at Tilburg University.

More information:

Dr. Jos Vermaseren (Nikhef) – email – phone: 020-5925125

Science Communication Nikhef: Vanessa Mexner – email – phone: 020-5925075

More information about the computer system FORM can be found at http://www.nikhef.nl/~form
The FORM source code can also be downloaded from these FORM pages, and there are links to the discussion forum.

Read also the News release "FORM open source"