A Machine Learning approach to scientific problems has been in use in Science and Engineering for decades. High-energy physics provided a natural domain of application of Machine Learning, profiting from these powerful tools for the advanced analysis of data from particle colliders. However, Machine Learning has been applied to Accelerator Physics only recently, with several laboratories worldwide deploying intense efforts in this domain. At CERN, Machine Learning techniques have been applied to beam dynamics studies related to the Large Hadron Collider and its luminosity upgrade, in domains including beam measurements and machine performance optimization. In this paper, the recent applications of Machine Learning to the analyses of numerical simulations of nonlinear beam dynamics are presented and discussed in detail. The key concept of dynamic aperture provides a number of topics that have been selected to probe Machine Learning. Indeed, the research presented here aims to devise efficient algorithms to identify outliers and to improve the quality of the fitted models expressing the time evolution of the dynamic aperture.
Machine learning for beam dynamics studies at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
