The upcoming February 9th and March 3rd the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) will host 152 catalan students to participate in the International Masterclasses on Particle Physics.
During the coming weeks, high-school students around the world are invited to nearby research institutes and universities for a day-long program to experience life at the forefront of basic research. These International Masterclasses give students the opportunity to become particle physicists for a day. During a Masterclass, participants work with data from experiments at CERN´s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, under the supervision of physicists. The Masterclasses this year will attract students from 50 countries worldwide.
International Masterclasses
Particle physics is one of the most important emerging fields in science. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in summer 2012 led to a huge media echo and large public interest. International Masterclasses meet this interest and offer high-school students the chance to explore this field of cutting-edge physics by working with recent, authentic data from experiments at the LHC. The basic idea of the annual program is to let students work as much as possible like real scientists. Four experiments - ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb the one in which ICCUB researcher participate- have made data available for educational use within the program.Scientists at about 210 universities and laboratories in 50 countries worldwide host International Masterclasses at their home institutions. New participants in the program come from Russia, Georgia, and Bangladesh. The worldwide participation reflects the international collaboration in particle physics. To simulate a real scientific working environment, each Masterclass ends with a video conference, where student groups from different countries connect with two moderators at CERN or Fermilab (Batavia, Illinois, U.S.) to combine and discuss their results. They can also pick their moderators’ brains in a Q&A section. Most video conferences end with a multiple choice quiz on particle physics. More than 60 physicists have volunteered to moderate the video conferences at CERN or Fermilab.
International Masterclasses are led by Technical University Dresden and QuarkNet, in close cooperation with the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG). IPPOG is an independent group of outreach representatives from countries involved in the research at CERN and other leading research laboratories. The group’s goal is to make particle physics more accessible to the public.
The International Masterclasses at ICCUB
At the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) this activity has been held since 2005 under the name of Taller de Física de Partícules. Over 1400 students from all over Catalonia have attended so far. This year, 152 students from 150 high school instituteswill attend one of the sessions, which will be held on February 9th and March 3rd at the Physics Faculty of the UB, headquarters of the ICCUB. The program will include several talks about particle physics, exercices with real data from the LHCb experiment, in which ICCUB researchers participate, and an international video conference with other institutes to share results. The students will also have the opportunity to visit the laboratories of the Faculty of Physics.
For further information:
Taller de Física de Partícules: www.lhc.cat/taller.php
International Masterclasses: www.physicsmasterclasses.org
