Super Intelligence for Particle Accelerators Gets Another Boost

In the next phase, MOAT-Core will deploy Osprey's capabilities at additional accelerators across the DOE complex and expand the tool to connect to digital twins and assist in accelerator design. By applying all of the information the SI learns at real machines, researchers will be able to quickly run more accurate simulations, plan future experiments, and design the next generation of particle accelerators - a process that currently takes years of computations and testing.

"You're choosing from magnets and components of different types, and strengths, and lengths, and positions," Hellert said. "There are an infinite number of possibilities, and only a handful of those are actually good solutions. The question of how to find them is a mathematically very challenging problem, but these coding agents and agentic SI are made for speedrunning these kinds of workflows."

Osprey is designed to improve the performance of large accelerators and light sources, which account for half of DOE's User Facilities and cover a broad range of science. For example, the SI tool will help run and optimize the ALS-U , the state-of-the-art upgrade underway at the Advanced Light Source. Researchers will use the enhanced ALS to study molecules and materials with atomic precision and to develop new technologies in microelectronics, energy storage, pharmaceuticals, quantum computing, and more.

SI tools like Osprey could also be important for running smaller accelerators with growing uses in industry, such as making microchips with EUV lithography. "There's a lot of benefit to industry from these kinds of tools that are developed at the National Labs," Hellert said.

The MOAT-Core collaboration includes: Argonne, Berkeley, Brookhaven, Fermi, Thomas Jefferson, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and SLAC National Laboratories; Cornell University; Michigan State University, Facility for Rare Isotope Beams; Old Dominion University; the University of Chicago; and industry partners.

Berkeley Lab researchers are partners on five additional projects, pending final agreements, that received Phase II Genesis Mission funding awards today: Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon (AXESS), Artificial Intelligence for High Performance Computing (AI4HPC), Application-Aware Error Correction Codesign for Scientific Quantum Computing (ASQC), Lattice QCD at the Intelligence Frontier, and MAESTRO (Multi-agent AI Expert for Subsurface Reasoning and Optimization).

DOE also announced additional Phase I Genesis Mission awards. Berkeley Lab researchers will partner on two projects, pending final agreements: From Beam Loss to Beam Intelligence: Adaptive Generative AI for Autonomous Accelerator Facilities, and Closed-Loop Autonomous Discovery of Mechanistic Activity-Selectivity-Stability Rules in Catalysis. Berkeley Lab continues to lead 13 previously announced Phase I Genesis Mission projects and collaborates as a partner on more than 30 others.

The Advanced Light Source is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

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