N3PDF was a research project led by PI Stefano Forte in the field of high-energy physics, financed by the European Research Council through an Advanced Grant (n° 740006) within the Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation Programme over a five-year and a half span (October 1, 2017 – March 31st, 2023). The results of the project were delivered in open-access form, mostly as papers and software. The project actively pursued the training of students at the undergraduate and graduate level, and the dissemination of its results and its science to students and the general public.
N3PDF aimed at revolutionizing the theory of strong interactions and its application to the determination of the structure of the proton, by introducing extensively techniques of artificial intelligence (AI). The core of the project was the development of an AI agent for the determinations of the parton distributions which encode the quark and gluon structure of the proton, using machine learning techniques. The project also included an integrated set of studies on higher-order computations and resummation in perturbative QCD, and the development of parton distributions interfaced to resummation and Monte Carlo generators. The project worked in synergy with the NNPDF collaboration, to which it provided methods and tools, and from which it gained physics input and insight.