200 Catalan secondary-school students to be physicists for a day at the Large Hadron Collider

Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment.
Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment.
(03/03/2011)

On 4 and 14 March, 200 Catalan secondary-school students will take part in interactive video-conference sessions with students from across the world as part of the Particle Physics Workshop, organized by the Faculty of Physics at the University of Barcelona (UB). Participants will be given access to real data recorded by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, Geneva).

Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment.
Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment.
03/03/2011

On 4 and 14 March, 200 Catalan secondary-school students will take part in interactive video-conference sessions with students from across the world as part of the Particle Physics Workshop, organized by the Faculty of Physics at the University of Barcelona (UB). Participants will be given access to real data recorded by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, Geneva).

A research group from the UBʼs Institute of Cosmos Sciences is involved in work towards the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, one of the four main detectors that studies the collisions generated by the LHC. This group has been responsible for organizing the Particle Physics Workshop since 2005, under the framework of the international masterclass programme “Hands on Particle Physics”, which each year offers 8000 secondary-school students from around the world the chance to learn more about particle physics. The initiative is supported by more than 100 universities and research laboratories in 23 countries and for the last seven years has been run simultaneously in over 30 research centres in the United States.

This year, and for the first time, two sessions will be held at the UB, made possible by the support of the Commissioner for Universities and Research of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the Catalan Physical Society. The workshop is divided into two parts: in the first, students will attend presentations made by researchers from the LHC, who will introduce fundamental concepts in particle physics; in the second, students will analyse real data from the LHC in an interactive video-conference session with students attending the workshop in other countries.
As part of the campaign to attract students for this yearʼs workshops, the UB has sent schools a DVD containing educational materials including a series of short documentaries on CERN and particle physics translated into Catalan and a short, original documentary on particle physics research at the University.