ATLAS Z-path Masterclass

atlas

Students are physicists for a day at a university or lab where they work with physiists to how to analyze real particle physics data in the form of event displays.

Each year more than 10.000 high school students in over 40 countries come to one of about 200 nearby universities or research centers for one day in order to unravel the mysteries of particle physics. Lectures from active scientists give insight in topics and methods of basic research at the fundaments of matter and forces, enabling the students to perform measurements on real data from particle physics experiments themselves. At the end of each day, like in an international research collaboration, the participants join in a video conference for discussion and combination of their results.

In the ATLAS Z-path masterclass, students identify events to build a histogram of the masses of Z bosons and other particles that show  decays into 2 leptons. They also identify 4-lepton and 2-photon events to build mass histograms from these as well.

Image Credit: CERN, Atlas

Attributes
Data Strand
Level
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Practices
Technology Requirements