Students Study Appliance of Science as They Become Physicists For a Day

Posted on: 14 March 2016

Trinity’s School of Mathematics recently opened its doors to secondary school students, offering them the opportunity to become particle physicists for a day.

Particle physics is the study of the fundamental constituents of matter, combining theoretical calculations and experimental searches and discoveries to understand the nature of the universe from its earliest moments.

The masterclass was part of a global initiative running in 42 countries, where students got to analyse real data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European organisation for nuclear research in Geneva.

The four experiments at CERN's LHC – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb – made data available for educational use and students examined the products of collisions between elementary particles that travel around the 27-km accelerator at close to the speed of light.

The students at TCD's masterclass analysed data from the ATLAS experiment related to decays of the Higgs boson into pairs of W bosons. In addition, a CERN-led video conference allowed them to combine data and discuss their findings with similar groups in Lund, Bratislava and Geneva performing the same exercise.

Assistant Professor John Bulava, who coordinated the event, said: "I enjoy organising this exercise because it shows Irish secondary school children that cutting-edge STEM research is an engaging career path in which your work is important to the global community."