Teachers, Students Analyze Data From European Particle Accelerator
With the help of a new Web portal, high school
teachers and
students involved with two Notre Dame University programs will now have
access
to data from experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
the
largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
The LHC is a 16.8-mile ring of magnets at the European
Organization of Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) near Geneva,
Switzerland.
Opened in 2008 with the first experiments completed in 2010, the LHC
allows
protons to smash together at close to the speed of light, creating
head-on
collisions that can give researchers clues about how nature behaves at a
fundamental level.
The data collected by the experiments, however, is
complicated, voluminous and complex, and researchers at CERN are just
now able
to make some of it available for analysis by the larger global research
community, including teachers and students via QuarkNet and I2U2, the two
programs at Notre Dame near South Bend, IN.
QuarkNet provides programs for high school science
teachers to
get first-hand information about physics research and to interact with
university-level scientists. I2U2, short for Interactions
in Understanding the Universe,
similarly provides tools for high school teachers and students in the
field of
physics.
The two programs collaborated to create a masterclass
and an
e-lab to take advantage of the data available from the Compact Muon
Solenoid (CMS) detector at CERN.
The CMS masterclass is a day-long event in which high
school
students and teacher learn the basics of particle physics and then use
tools
developed by QuarkNet to analyze a sample of CMS data. Afterwards, they
are
able to meet via video teleconferencing with CMS physicists to discuss
their
results.
The CMS e-class is an online self-directed study
program that
allows students and teachers to go into greater depth with the available
data.
"These outreach programs help educate and inspire the
next
generation of scientists," said Notre Dame Physics Professor Mitchell
Wayne. "They
demonstrate the interesting and creative ways these data can be used by
high
school teachers and students."
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.