emirates7 - Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have demonstrated that artificial intelligence can independently rediscover fundamental principles of particle physics, a breakthrough that could accelerate future discoveries about the universe’s underlying laws.

In a study published in the Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP), NYU Abu Dhabi scientists showed that relatively simple AI techniques can uncover the same patterns that took human physicists' decades to identify during the development of the Standard Model, the framework that describes the fundamental particles and forces of nature.

The research team, Aya Abdelhaq, Pellegrino Piantadosi, and Fernando Quevedo, used experimental data from particle discoveries of the 1950s and 1960s. Without prior knowledge of the mathematical tools used at the time, the AI system identified organising principles behind dozens of particles.

“This study shows that AI can uncover deep physical laws directly from data, opening the door to discovering new particles and patterns that humans may have missed,” said Pellegrino Piantadosi, NYUAD postdoctoral associate and one of the paper’s authors.