Secondary school students taking part in the Big Data: ATLAS project have had their results published in the European Physical Journal Plus.
Big Data: ATLAS is an award-winning schools research partnership between the Institute for Research in Schools, the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for UK state schools and colleges. Online resources provide training in using Python to access and manipulate real-time data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider so that students can help to find evidence of the Higgs boson – and much more. After three months of developing their skills and seeing the data, students are then supported to develop their own research idea using the ATLAS data.
Results from some of the participating students’ own research projects have now been published in a scientific journal. Professor Alan Barr leads the project at the Department of Physics: ‘The students demonstrated remarkable creativity and curiosity in designing their projects and to have their results published in a scientific journal is testament to how committed they were to the project. Their work was really impressive.’
Real particle physics analysis by UK secondary school students using the ATLAS Open Data: an illustration through a collection of original student research, E Conroy et al, European Physical Journal Plus