Autonomous Discovery of Particle Physics Theories from Experimental Data

TL;DR

The paper presents extsc{Albert}, a neuro-symbolic AI framework that autonomously explores particle physics theories from experimental data, successfully rediscovering the Standard Model and predicting the top quark's properties.

Contribution

Introducing extsc{Albert}, a novel AI system that systematically navigates the theory space of particle physics using formal language encoding and reinforcement learning, avoiding hallucinations.

Findings

extsc{Albert} rediscovered the Standard Model from legacy data.

It predicted the top quark mass as 178.9±5.0 GeV.

The framework demonstrated autonomous theory inference consistent with modern measurements.

Abstract

The search for physics beyond the Standard Model is hindered by a combinatorial explosion of possible theories. We introduce \textsc{Albert}, a neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence framework to systematically navigate this vast theory space. By encoding particle physics as a formal language, \textsc{Albert} generates tokenized sequences representing symmetries, particles, and interactions under a rule-based grammar, eliminating the hallucinations common in large language models. The reinforcement learning environment enforces first-principle theoretical constraints, computes observables with radiative corrections, and evaluates statistical likelihood via $\chi^2$ analysis against experimental data. As a proof of concept, we train a 25-million-parameter transformer model using only legacy data from the Large Electron-Positron Collider, which contains no direct evidence of the top quark. Remarkably, \textsc{Albert} successfully rediscovered the Standard Model and autonomously inferred necessity and properties of the top quark, predicting its mass at $178.9\pm 5.0~\text{GeV}$, consistent with its modern measurement at the Large Hadron Collider. These results demonstrate the potential of AI-driven theory exploration as a rigorous, hallucination-free, and scalable paradigm for autonomous discovery of new physics.