GWFP Seminar - From collisions to physics: taming 4 TB/s at LHCb

Tuesday 19 May 2026, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Amsterdam

Speaker: Dr. Maarten van Veghel

Gravitational Waves and Fundamental Physics

Maastricht University

 

About the speaker: Maarten van Veghel is an assistant professor in the GWFP department and a member of the LHCb collaboration at CERN. His research focuses on a combination of high-throughput real-time data processing with emphasis on reconstruction algorithms and fast machine learning inference; and on the analysis of beauty hadron decays to charged leptons and neutrinos using novel heavy-flavour tracking techniques. He has been coordinator of LHCb’s real-time reconstruction software during Run 3 and the convener of the ML Forum at LHCb.

From collisions to physics: taming 4 TB/s at LHCb

The LHCb experiment operates at the Large Hadron Collider in an environment characterized by extreme collision rates and abundant QCD backgrounds. With a primary focus on heavy flavour physics, often involving subtle signatures, the experiment is designed to maximize its physics reach by reading out the detector at every bunch crossing. This results in a raw data rate of approximately 4 TB/s, far exceeding what can be stored. This talk describes how LHCb meets the resulting challenge through a fully software-based real-time reconstruction and selection pipeline, and how this architecture directly shapes the experiment's physics reach.