Research Day for School Students Makes Use of LHC Data

It´s that time again: In March research institutes around the world open their doors and invite high school students to become particle physicists for one day. On 17 March 2011 the Max Planck Institute for Physics, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the Excellence Cluster Universe at the Technische Universität München team up for the seventh international Hands on Particle Physics Masterclasses.

This year more than 8000 students will participate in the International Hands on Particle Physics Masterclasses and analyse real data from the new and powerful particle accelerator at CERN, Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The students groups from across Europe, the United States, South Africa, Brazil, and Israel will discuss the results of their measurements with other groups via videoconference, moderated by researchers at CERN. In Munich, 50 high school students meet to study the data at the Technische Universität München. Scientists of the Excellence Cluster Universe will give introductory lectures to prepare the students for their analyses.

The International Hands on Particle Physics Masterclasses will take place from March 4 to 26, 2011. Scientists at about 100 universities and laboratories in 23 countries will host these international student research days at their home institutions. In addition, more than 30 US-institutes will participate via a branch program in US as part of the QuarkNet program. This year students will face a very special challenge: They can work on the first real data from the LHC, collected just few months ago. Three experiments – ATLAS, CMS, and ALICE – have made data available for educational use within the program. Students can for example rediscover the Z boson or the structure of the proton, reconstruct “strange particles”, or search for the elusive Higgs boson in particle tracks.

International Hands on Particle Physics Masterclasses take place under the central coordination of Uta Bilow, Technical University Dresden, in close cooperation with the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) and with support of the Helmholtz Alliance “Physics at the Terascale” and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As part of the program, students receive a DVD with interactive material related to particle physics, translated into 17 languages with the help of IPPOG and support of the European Physical Society (EPS).


For further information:

Hands-on Particle Physics Masterclasses: www.physicsmasterclasses.org