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Content from Outreach and educational activities and resources

Last updated on 2026-07-29 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • What level are these activities for?
  • What skills are needed for these activities?
  • How can I deploy these activities for my students?
  • Can I or my students go further than what is listed here?

Objectives

  • Good questions

Particle physics playground

Testimonial
  • Intended audience
    • High school
    • Undergrad
  • Learning goals
    • Python reinforcement
    • Relativistic kinematics reinforcement
  • Necessary skills/background knowledge
    • Basic python
    • pandas (for some exercises)
    • Some awareness of relativistic kinematics
  • Length of time to complete
    • 45-120 minutes (suggested HW assignment)

In this activity, students will read in data representing the energy and momentum of pairs of muons, recorded in collisions at the LHC with the CMS detector. Students will calculate the mass of these muons using both classical physics and special relativity.

This activity has been used with freshman in an introductory programming class and an upper-level particle physics course. Introductory python and exposure to the matplotlib and pandas libraries are sufficient.

Supplemental material is also provided for instructors who want to go further with their students.

Supplemental materials

Depending on the level of students that you are working with and how much scaffolding you want to provide, the following materials may be helpful.

  • Four-vector practice
    • Google Doc of 4-vectors This document contains randomly generated 4-vectors that either have the same mass or come from the same parent particle. They can be printed out, cut up into strips, and passed out to students to calculate and compare.
    • Colab notebook to generate 4-vectors This is very much a work in-progress so it might not be obvious how to use this. Let’s make it better!
  • Particle lifetime activity / homework (python/Colab). This assignment asks students to look up the lifetimes of particles and calculate how far they move in the lab for different momenta. Students also make a plot of lifetime for particles, color-coded by the interaction that mediates their dominant decays.
  • Sample lesson plan and supplemental slides.

Quark Workbench

Testimonial
  • Intended audience
    • High school or university physics students
  • Learning goals
    • How quarks are combined into bound states (mesons and baryons)
    • Allowed “color” combinations for quark bound states
    • Electric charges of quarks in different families
    • Electric charge options for different mesons and baryons
    • Changes in charge and color between particles and antiparticles
  • Necessary skills/background knowledge
    • Electric charge
    • Basic knowledge about quarks as particles
    • Experience with jigsaw puzzles
  • Length of time to complete
    • 20 mins

These quark puzzles are a fun hands-on way for students to learn how quarks work together to produce the particles they already know, like protons and neutrons. Solving the puzzles shows students that only certain color combinations are allowed for baryons and mesons. By studying the puzzle pieces they can see the different electric charges of up and charm quarks compared to down and strange quarks, and they can see how electric charge and color change from particle to antiparticle. Once they build some mesons or baryons they can see what electric charges are possible for those particles.

Workshop presentation slides: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1672496/contributions/7205877/attachments/3320507/5945531/ODWS2026_QuarkWorkbench.pdf These slides show the background information, workbench prompts, and learning questions that I give my students in class.

Particle Discovery Lab

Testimonial
  • Intended audience
    • University physics students studying Modern Physics
  • Learning goals
    • Practical experience using relativistic energy and momentum
    • Correctly apply energy and momentum conservation principles
    • Learn to analyze large-scale physics data stored in arrays
    • Gain prociency in understanding histograms and Poisson-distributed data
    • Practice performing and evaluating polynomial fits
    • Learn strategies for removing indistinguishable background events
    • Apply knowledge of uncertainty propagation
    • Create high-quality visualizations of data
    • Learn more about the history of a particular meson or boson
  • Necessary skills/background knowledge
    • Python or MATLAB programming experience (e.g., from a computational physics course or introduction to programming course)
    • Modern Physics course knowledge of relativistic kinematics and energy conservation
  • Length of time to complete
    • 2+ hours
    • The length of time is configurable based on which topics are included. My students use about 6 hours over 3 lab periods to complete the entire activity as written.

The particle discovery lab uses CMS dimuon data from 2016 published via the CERN Open Data Portal. We have developed an undergraduate intermediate-level lab exercise to complement the many high school-level exercises available via the Open Data Portal. Student code is available in both MATLAB and Python, and does not require special CMS Open Data software. The goal of this exercise is to reconstruct decays of unknown particle X (initial state) to 2 muons (final state). Students will use histograms to display their calculated mass for particle X, and learn about fitting and subtracting background contributions from data. Uncertainty propagation concepts are included through each step of the analysis. After isolating the signal distribution students will determine which particle they have discovered and compare their observed properties (mass and width) to the known properties.

Workshop presentation slides: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1672496/contributions/7205877/attachments/3320507/5945532/ODWS2026_ParticleDiscoveryLab.pdf

Diumuon invariant mass spectrum from NANOAOD

Exploring a NANOAOD dataset and making an invariant mass plot

Testimonial
  • Intended audience
    • High school or university physics students
  • Learning goals
    • How to load NANOAOD using uproot and awkward
    • How to make simple selections on events
    • How to calculate and plot invariant mass
  • Necessary skills/background knowledge
    • Python in a jupyter environment
    • awkward arrays
    • Python plotting with matplotlib
    • invariant mass
  • Length of time to complete
    • 20 mins

Visualizing NANOAOD in a Jupyter notebook

This is a lesson to show how to visualise NANOAOD data in a Jupyter notebook.

Testimonial
  • Intended audience
    • High school or university physics students
  • Learning goals
    • How to visualize individual NANOAOD events in a jupyter notebook
  • Necessary skills/background knowledge
    • Python in a jupyter environment
  • Length of time to complete
    • 15 mins

Maching Learning in Particle Physics

Building a Simplified Particle Transformer for CMS Jet Classification

Testimonial
  • Intended audience
    • Undergraduate students
    • Advanced high schoolers with some Python and linear algebra exposure can follow, but this is scoped as undergrad-level given the transformer architecture content
  • Learning goals
    • Understand what a jet is and how a Higgs boson decaying to bb or cc shows up in CMS data
    • Learn how a transformer works from scratch (embeddings, self-attention, multi-head attention)
    • Build and train a simplified Particle Transformer (MiniParT) end to end in PyTorch on Google Colab
    • Evaluate a trained model using ROC curves and AUC, and see where the physics makes classification genuinely hard
  • Necessary skills/background knowledge
    • Basic Python (variables, functions, loops)
    • General familiarity with the idea of machine learning, no prior neural network or transformer experience needed
    • A Google account for Colab
  • Length of time to complete
    • 2 to 3 hours

This lesson builds, from scratch, a small transformer model, MiniParT, in PyTorch, that classifies pairs of jets from CMS Open Data as coming from a Higgs boson decaying to two bottom quarks (Hbb), a Higgs boson decaying to two charm quarks (Hcc), or ordinary QCD background. MiniParT is a scaled down version of the Particle Transformer used in real CMS physics analyses, small enough to train in minutes on a free Colab session, but built on the same architecture ideas as the full size model.

Key Points
  • There are lots of good activities that you can use as-is
  • All of these lessons allow you to make a copy and edit to work best for your class
  • The facilitators are here to help you learn to use these materials