The Particle Detectives

One of the jobs of a physicist is to teach others to promote their work and create an interest in physics. Since many of them are bored waiting for the Large Hadron Collider to start operation next year, they create fancy games and simulations, like AMELIA, for students of all ages. The latest such online tool is the Particle Detective that was designed for the senior high school students. It contains a simulation of a detector in LHC that allows the users to set the different parameters like the magnet strength and cooling level in order to optimize the energy and power usage of the entire accelerator. Then it displays images of events and allows them to be captured. The job of the student is then to identify if it matches any of the predictions that LHC is supposed to verify: the Higg’s Boson, supersymmetry and miniature black holes. Any successful matches can then be viewed in a 3D environment.

The simulation contains the explanations of the different particle, along with a description of the tools used by actual physicists. More ever the site itself contains prepared slides and presentation that teachers can use in class environments.

Happy smashing!