Secondary-school students become particle physicists for a day at the Faculty of Physics
The subatomic particles quarks and leptons will be the stars of the 6th Particle Physics Workshop, to take place on 5 March at the Faculty of Physics as part of the successful international initiative Hands-on Particle Physics Masterclasses, which promotes research in the field of particle physics and draws the participation of around 6,000 high school students from around the world each year.
The subatomic particles quarks and leptons will be the stars of the 6th Particle Physics Workshop, to take place on 5 March at the Faculty of Physics as part of the successful international initiative Hands-on Particle Physics Masterclasses, which promotes research in the field of particle physics and draws the participation of around 6,000 high school students from around the world each year.
For the workshop, the Faculty of Physics will be visited by 100 high school students who will be given the chance to work with experimental data from particle accelerators run by the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) (Hands on CERN). The students will use specialized software to analyse collisions of elementary particles travelling at velocities close to the speed of light around a circular accelerator path with a diameter of 27 kilometres. They will also be able to compare and discuss results via video-conference with students in other countries, replicating the activities of researchers involved in international research projects.
The program of Masterclasses is coordinated by the European Particle Physics Outreach Group (EPPOG), an independent body formed by representatives of the countries involved in the CERN project, the CERN laboratory itself, and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY). The program of activities, scheduled to take place between 15 February and 5 March, is supported by more than 90 universities and laboratories in 22 countries and a parallel network of 22 research centres in the United States. The workshop in Catalonia is organized jointly by the University of Barcelona, the Catalan government's Commission for Universities and Research, and the Catalan Society of Physics.