Nine students from Bridgewater-Raritan High School spent a day at Drew University, participating in a Student Masterclass on Elementary Particle Physics organized by the Drew QuarkNet Center on April 5.
This student masterclass on elementary particle physics was a fantastic opportunity for physics students to work on real particle accelerator data from CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. They were able to test the energy, mass, and momentum conservation principles we have worked on in class, using experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN in Switzerland.
The students were Piya Advani, Arjun Agarwal, Alice Jiang, Alexander Bruno, Colin Hawley, Mohit Srinivasan, Nandika Nambiar, Mayur Kashyap, and Tianyi Li.
Dr. Eleni Arapaki, the high school’s AP Physics 1 & 2 Teacher, explained the day in the following summary.
The LHC accelerates protons to almost 7500 times the energy equivalent of their mass. The protons circulate in opposite directions and collide in the center of CMS. But protons are not just particles: they are more like bags of quarks and gluons. When protons collide, all sorts of very short-lived particles can be made from all that energy.
At the most simplistic level, electrons are responsible for the electricity that lights our houses and turns on our computers. Muons are some sort of heavier cousin of the electron, but we're not sure just what the relationship is. This Mu2e experiment will help us understand that relationship, and so understanding muons is part of understanding the electrons that power our society.
During the masterclass, pairs of students examined sets of 100 actual events from the CMS WZH experiment at CERN using iSpy-webgl, an online three-dimensional event display. Events are characterized as 1-, 2-, or 4-lepton (excluding any neutrinos) and used the event display to find invariant masses of possible parent particles of the 2- and 4-lepton events. Students entered results in the online CMS Instrument for Masterclass Analysis (CIMA), which creates 2- and 4-lepton mass plots and counts electrons, muons, and W+ and W- candidates, so that students may derive simple but important ratios that characterize the data.
Supported by QuarkNet, Fermilab, and international partners, masterclasses enable students to be particle physicists for a day. The students had the chance to learn about the Standard Model and experimental particle physics, meet with panelists from Drew and Notre Dame Universities, attend presentations on AI implementation on Big Data Analysis, work together to analyze authentic data and participate in a video conference with scientists from Fermi Lab, the University of Mexico, and two schools, one from Mexico and one from Colombia.
. “The students who have participated in this masterclass may make a report and publish their results. Some of our students took advantage of this opportunity and we cannot wait to see their work published,” Dr. Arapaki said.