Science and software collaboration

Not every software company can say one of its team members helps investigate the mysteries of the universe. At Hotovo, we can—and it's more than just a brag-worthy fact. It’s a powerful demonstration of how science and software development intersect, and how meaningful projects can attract talent even from the most unexpected places.

Our colleague Martin works as a DevOps engineer at Hotovo, is scientist and teacher of nuclear and subnuclear physics at the University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik in Košice, and collaborates with CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Through his work on the ALICE experiment (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), he’s helping answer one of humanity’s oldest questions: What are we made of?

The Science Behind ALICE

To understand the beginnings of our universe—the moment after the Big Bang—we have to go deep. Deeper than atoms, deeper than electrons. Inside the nucleus of every atom are protons and neutrons, and within those are even smaller particles called quarks. These are held together by gluons, particles responsible for the strong force.

Here’s the strange part: the farther apart quarks get, the more they pull toward each other—an opposite behavior to what we observe in gravity. Quarks never exist alone; we only detect them in pairs or triplets. 

So how do we observe something so small we can’t see it—not even with an electron microscope? That’s where CERN’s particle accelerator comes in.

The World's Most Powerful Microscope

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 27-kilometer circular tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border. It accelerates protons to 99.99996% of the speed of light in two separate pipes, guided by powerful magnets. At specific collision points, the beams are directed into each other, creating high-energy impacts that briefly recreate conditions from the early universe.

These collisions release such enormous energy that quarks and gluons may temporarily separate into a state called quark-gluon plasma—something like a primordial "soup" believed to have existed just after the Big Bang. ALICE is an experiment specifically designed to study this state.

But detecting and analyzing these collisions is no small task. Each second, millions of collisions generate terabytes of data. Over time, we’re talking about petabytes and even exabytes of information.

From Particle Physics to Software Development

That’s where IT expertise becomes essential. To process and store such vast amounts of data, CERN relies on a global grid of data centers. The smaller one is in Košice. Martin is part of this infrastructure—not only helping to maintain it, but also developing tools that make analysis faster, more interactive, and more accessible for physicists around the world.

Together with students and with support from Hotovo, he’s building an interactive software tool for analyzing data from the ALICE experiment. This project, known as NDM Space (N-Dimensional Space), allows users to explore complex datasets in multiple dimensions—visually and intuitively. Instead of waiting days for results, the tool helps researchers iterate faster, refine parameters, and visualize thousands of possible scenarios.

The tool was presented last year at the ALICE Tier-1/Tier-2 workshop in Seoul, showcasing how it could simplify data analysis workflows for physicists. And it all started with a conversation—an idea that software and physics could work better together.

A Win-Win Collaboration

This story isn’t just about one person. It’s also about how initiatives, for example Live IT Projects, create bridges between universities and the IT world. It shows the kind of projects that attract top talent. Despite having an exciting role in science, Martin chose to work with Hotovo because of the meaningful challenges we take on in software development. That’s a message worth sharing—not just to highlight individual brilliance, but to inspire stronger ties between science, education, and software development.