Raw Signal: Agents and physicists complete an ALEPH thrust analysis
A paper in *HiHEP* reports a proof-of-concept measurement of the thrust distribution in electron-positron collisions at 91.2 GeV using archived ALEPH data. The work used interactive natural-language prompting of Anthropic Claude and OpenAI Codex. Under physicist guidance, the agents wrote and executed all analysis code and drafted the majority of the paper’s text.
The reported spectrum was fully corrected using Iterative Bayesian Unfolding and Monte Carlo-based corrections. The authors explicitly distinguish the demonstration from a dedicated precision thrust measurement: the principal contribution is the agentic analysis workflow. The paper describes a 36-page study with 17 figures and four tables; its current arXiv version includes journal proofreading corrections and is published in *HiHEP* 2 (2026) 3, 10.