Physicist for a day

Left to right: Glenbrook South students Arun Surath, Albert Kim and Hannah Nelson work with their teacher, Suzanne Webb, during a Masterclass hosted by Argonne.

Roughly 170 U.S. high school students got the chance to explore the energy frontier for a day. In March, laboratories and universities across the country and in Puerto Rico, hosted students as part of a U.S. Masterclass in particle physics. Organized in the U.S. by QuarkNet, the hands-on class gave high school students the chance to close their textbooks for the day and analyze data from a particle accelerator.

"The Masterclass teaches students about the importance of statistics, the need for large data sets and that one particle event doesn't necessarily tell you anything," said Ken Cecire, a QuarkNet staffer at Hampton University, who organized the event.

Students received general knowledge about particle physics from their teachers, and then spent their Masterclass day at a host laboratory or university. They started their morning with a tour and then learned how to identify particles. Students then broke into pairs to analyze data sets of 1,000 particle events from the old LEP collider at CERN.

The students tallied up the number of electrons, muons, taus and hadron jets in their data sets and shared their results via videoconference with high school students in other Masterclass locations across the country. Physicists at Fermilab moderated the videoconferences to confirm their results.

"I learned that science is a collaborative process," wrote Nabil Hoq, a student at Medford High School in Medford, Massachusetts, in the QuarkNet student blog for the LHC. "Interacting with people at other sites across the country and sharing data, helped us understand our statistical differences and similarities."

The European Particle Physics Outreach Group developed the Masterclass concept in 2005. The U.S. first participated in 2006. Next year, Cecire hopes to connect more U.S. high schools to other Masterclass centers across the world.

Read the student blog.

--Elizabeth Clements

Computing Division reaches 3 million hours without injury

Congratulations to the Computing Division, which recently surpassed 3 million hours worked since the division's last DART case. "This is a remarkable achievement. Keep up the great work!" said Bill Griffing, head of ES&H.

American students shine a spotlight on CERN

From CERN Bulletin, April 14, 2008

Between April 2 and 7, 18 American high school students were let loose at CERN armed with video cameras. Their mission? To take on the role of broadcast journalists and inspire their peers across the US with short documentaries and blogs illuminating the work happening at the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

Following in the footsteps of professional journalists around the world, six teams of American high school students recently travelled to CERN to experience the increasing excitement in the run-up to the switch-on of the LHC. The six teams are from five states across the U.S. and were the winners of a competition sponsored and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

Each team consists of three students plus a teacher, who combine their knowledge of physics, communication and video production to produce a short film. The teams interviewed physicists involved in the LHC and the four big experiments as well as getting footage from the Open Days.

Read the student blogs

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