Unicorn University students complete a digital database of particle accelerator internal detector components
Our students can boast unprecedented success. They have created the ITk Production Database, an information system that records every detail about all the components of the internal detector for the ATLAS experiment - part of the particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Work on the development of the information system began in 2017, and the system has been in use and developing ever since. It is now almost complete and can be fully exploited. The project was carried out by Unicorn's founder Vladimír Kovář and Marek Beránek, IT Director at Unicorn University. A dozen of students helped them continuously.
The ITk Production Database information system is used to keep track of the digital twins of the components that make up the internal detector of the ATLAS experiment. "The instrument's digital twin contains a detailed list of all components, including the smallest screws and chips, and even the adhesive used. The system also tracks the route that each component took to CERN, which is key to ensuring that the detector functions flawlessly throughout the ten-year experiment. All the experts involved agree that accurate, rigorous, and formal record-keeping is the way to go," adds Vladimír Kovář.
The search for dark matter particles
CERN is home to the world's largest and most complex experimental facility - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is located near Geneva, Switzerland, in a 100-meter-deep tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometers. Inside it, proton collisions take place, allowing scientists to observe what happened in the universe immediately after the Big Bang. "In the LHC's main acceleration ring, protons are accelerated to nearly the speed of light. Strong electromagnetic fields generated by superconducting magnets are used to keep the protons in a circular orbit and accelerate them further," explains Marek Beránek, IT director at Unicorn University.
The particle accelerator contains several detectors where protons collide, and scientists observe what happens to the particles. The largest detector is ATLAS, which boasts impressive dimensions: it is 25 meters high, 45 meters long, and weighs 7,000 tonnes. During the experiment, more than a billion particle interactions take place every second, which corresponds to a data transfer rate comparable to all the people on Earth having 20 simultaneous phone calls at the same moment.
Only one in a million collisions in the detector is judged to be potentially interesting and is stored for further study. The detector tracks and identifies particles that are key to the study of a wide range of physical phenomena, including the study of the Higgs boson, the top quark, and the search for extra dimensions and particles that make up dark matter. ATLAS is designed to observe up to 1.7 billion proton-proton collisions per second, with a total data volume of more than 60 million megabytes per second.
The decision to retain the event data is made less than 2.5 microseconds after the event occurs. During this short period of time, the event data is temporarily buffered. If the event is judged relevant, it is passed to a second-level software trigger that can process up to 100,000 events per second. "This trigger performs a very detailed analysis of each recorded collision event in just 200 microseconds, examining data from specific areas of the detector. Finally, it selects approximately 1,000 events per second, which are transmitted to a data storage system where offline analysis takes place. During the recent rebuild of the internal detector to improve its performance and allow scientists to uncover more information, a team of students from Unicorn University was involved in this process," explains Beránek.
A better system thanks to Czech students
Thanks to the new ITk Production Database system, created in the Unicorn Universe digital kit and hosted on the Plus4U web service, scientists have detailed information on manufactured parts. "To date, the system contains records of nearly 800,000 parts and 9 million tests performed. In March 2024, 4 GB of data was added to the system, and more than 105 GB of data was downloaded. During 2023, over 85 million operations were run on the application, and another 20 million in the first three months of 2024 alone. These figures illustrate the system's key role in detector operations," says Beránek, adding that the system is now used by more than 1.1 thousand users from around 140 institutions worldwide, demonstrating its vital importance to the international physics community.
"In addition, there are dozens of other software products being developed by scientific institutions with a focus primarily on analyzing the data stored in our information system, which they access via APIs (application programming interfaces). These are various analytical tools in Python and other programming languages that allow scientists to efficiently analyze the data collected and extract valuable information for further research. And this would not be possible without our unique architecture,"
- Marek Beránek
Unicorn Universe digital building sets and architecture
The owner of Unicorn, Vladimír Kovář, has been working on the software architecture that forms the core of the Unicorn Universe digital kit since 2014. "My main motivation has always been to produce software solutions in a factory way, in short, to cut it like Bata's drills. I'm also a big fan of Lego kits, and when you combine this with the Internet of Things, cloud technologies, and various end devices such as mobile phones, laptops, smart TVs, and tablets that use HTML5 and JavaScript, you get the foundations for creating our kit," says Kovář. He adds that besides solutions for CERN, his teams are systematically developing other products, such as Red Monster's online educational courses, green energy certificates, and Damas systems for electricity trading. "Last year, we built 92 such systems in our architecture," concludes Kovář.
Supporting innovation and education
Involving students and scientific institutions in the development of the ITk Production Database not only supports the technical progress of the project but also provides valuable educational opportunities for future generations of scientists. Approximately ten students from Unicorn College participated in the project. Some of them had the development of an application for CERN as a topic for their bachelor's or master's thesis, while others incorporated the development into their internships. The cooperation between Unicorn College and such a prestigious institution as CERN was sponsored by public institutions, such as CTU, the Academy of Sciences and Charles University.
