Last week, AIMS hosted its first ever International Masterclass, Hands-on Particle Physics. This outreach event offers high school students the chance to become a particle physicist for one day.

After a (gentle) theoretical introduction, the participants learned how to identify particles and perform a simplified (yet challenging) analysis with real data from CERN!

Prof. Claire David, the Academic Director of the AI for Science programme at AIMS, is also an experimental particle physicist and member of the ATLAS collaboration. The International Masterclass featured the ATLAS experiment, one of the detectors of the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator located at CERN.

For this first edition, 25 students from eight Capetonian highschools with six accompanying teachers took part in this special day. As part of the masterclasses’ collaborative spirit, the students worked at desktops in teams of two, each member from a different school. At the back of the room, teachers were paired up and also participated in the analysis game.

Everyone had fun identifying electrons, muons (heavier cousins) or photons and saved their analysed data at the end. The session culminated in a live conference with CERN, where moderators merged the results from all groups and discussed the peaks in the combined histograms with the students. Everyone got a better understanding of what experimental particle physicists do and how data analysis can lead to discoveries, ultimately helping us unravel the mysteries of matter and forces at their most basic level.

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to AIMS volunteers Abdallah, Astride, Josiah, Koffi, Mushtaha and Similoluwa for making things smooth and tirelessly assisting participants.
Thanks to participating schools: Glendale Secondary, Grassdale High, Lentegeur High School, Masiphumelele, Sinethemba Secondary, Sithembele Matiso, Sophumelela and Wynberg High.
AIMS is grateful to IPPOG and its partners for their help in facilitating the event. We are looking forward to hosting many International Masterclasses in the future.