GRACE: an Agentic AI for Particle Physics Experiment Design and Simulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hill, Justin, Ryoo, Hong Joo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hill, Justin
Ryoo, Hong Joo
author_facet Hill, Justin
Ryoo, Hong Joo
contents We present GRACE, a simulation-native agent for autonomous experimental design in high-energy and nuclear physics. Given multimodal input in the form of a natural-language prompt or a published experimental paper, the agent extracts a structured representation of the experiment, constructs a runnable toy simulation, and autonomously explores design modifications using first-principles Monte Carlo methods. Unlike agentic systems focused on operational control or execution of predefined procedures, GRACE addresses the upstream problem of experimental design: proposing non-obvious modifications to detector geometry, materials, and configurations that improve physics performance under physical and practical constraints. The agent evaluates candidate designs through repeated simulation, physics-motivated utility functions, and budget-aware escalation from fast parametric models to full Geant4 simulations, while maintaining strict reproducibility and provenance tracking. We demonstrate the framework on historical experimental setups, showing that the agent can identify optimization directions that align with known upgrade priorities, using only baseline simulation inputs. We also conducted a benchmark in which the agent identified the setup and proposed improvements from a suite of natural language prompts, with some supplied with a relevant physics research paper, of varying high energy physics (HEP) problem settings. This work establishes experimental design as a constrained search problem under physical law and introduces a new benchmark for autonomous, simulation-driven scientific reasoning in complex instruments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_15039
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GRACE: an Agentic AI for Particle Physics Experiment Design and Simulation
Hill, Justin
Ryoo, Hong Joo
High Energy Physics - Experiment
Artificial Intelligence
We present GRACE, a simulation-native agent for autonomous experimental design in high-energy and nuclear physics. Given multimodal input in the form of a natural-language prompt or a published experimental paper, the agent extracts a structured representation of the experiment, constructs a runnable toy simulation, and autonomously explores design modifications using first-principles Monte Carlo methods. Unlike agentic systems focused on operational control or execution of predefined procedures, GRACE addresses the upstream problem of experimental design: proposing non-obvious modifications to detector geometry, materials, and configurations that improve physics performance under physical and practical constraints. The agent evaluates candidate designs through repeated simulation, physics-motivated utility functions, and budget-aware escalation from fast parametric models to full Geant4 simulations, while maintaining strict reproducibility and provenance tracking. We demonstrate the framework on historical experimental setups, showing that the agent can identify optimization directions that align with known upgrade priorities, using only baseline simulation inputs. We also conducted a benchmark in which the agent identified the setup and proposed improvements from a suite of natural language prompts, with some supplied with a relevant physics research paper, of varying high energy physics (HEP) problem settings. This work establishes experimental design as a constrained search problem under physical law and introduces a new benchmark for autonomous, simulation-driven scientific reasoning in complex instruments.
title GRACE: an Agentic AI for Particle Physics Experiment Design and Simulation
topic High Energy Physics - Experiment
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15039