CAPA is once again joining a new edition of the Particle Physics Masterclasses, an activity designed to spark scientific curiosity among secondary school and high-school students. Throughout the day, participants will have the opportunity to discover how matter is investigated at the subatomic scale and to work with real data from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, just as the physicists involved in one of the world’s largest scientific projects do.
The activity is organized by the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) and will take place at the Faculty of Sciences on Friday, March 20. On March 26, the activity will be held at the CCBPP in Benasque.
In the IPPOG Particle Physics Masterclass, students engage directly with current research by working with real data from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. After an introductory, outreach-focused overview of the Standard Model and how the detector works, they analyze authentic proton–proton collision events using educational tools similar to those used by professional physicists. They learn to identify particles such as electrons and muons from the signals they leave in the detector and to select events characteristic of well-known processes.
Using these events, students build simple distributions—such as invariant mass plots—in which peaks associated with particles like the W and Z bosons appear, reproducing on a small scale the real methods of particle physics. In the afternoon, there is a joint discussion of results and an international videoconference in which different institutions compare their measurements, showing how collaborative work is carried out in experiments like ATLAS and bringing students closer to frontier physics in a practical and participatory way.