Outreach and educational activities by the Centre are aimed at:
- engaging young people with the concepts of particle physics; and
- developing public knowledge of Australia's role in the global quest for knowledge in this area.
If your school is interested in receiving a visit from one of our physicists, please contact us.
International Masterclass
The International Masterclass has become a key element of CoEPP’s outreach program. The masterclass is offered to year 11 and 12 high-school physics students who are given the opportunity to come on-campus to learn the basics of fundamental physics through working with real experimental data, and experience what it would be like to work in a large collaboration such as ATLAS. The class runs concurrently in all CoEPP node states: South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. It has developed in popularity across Australia and now sees students from non-node states fly in to experience the day. The class is presented with assistance from the International Particle Physics Outreach Group, (IPPOG) and QuarkNet (a physics outreach network of universities and laboratories in the USA). International masterclasses are held each year, for approximately 6,000 high-school students from around 28 countries.
On the day of the masterclass, students receive lectures on the Standard Model and ATLAS experiment and are given tutorials covering ATLAS data analysis and the use of the event display program HYPATIA. Students analyse real ATLAS experiment data using HYPATIA. Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney students then upload their data and join via videoconference to explain their results. The videoconference session gives a real taste of what it is like to work in a large collaborative experiment. These sessions are moderated by a physicist based at Fermilab, who then ends the session with a presentation of the four groups’ combined results.
The day culminates in a virtual tour of the ATLAS experiment. The students are taken through aspects of ATLAS and given the opportunity to ask questions of ATLAS physicists through live videoconferencing.
Work experience week
In June, the Melbourne node hosts a work experience week for interested year-10 students. The Work Experience program in the School of Physics allows groups of students the opportunity to experience many facets of conducting research in an academic environment. Students will attend talks, conduct experiments, work on a small research project and give their own presentation as well as have plenty of opportunities to speak with scientists in their field of interest.
Collision: art-meets-science for National Science Week
COLLISION is an outreach project by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP). CoEPP physicists work on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. It is a competition for artists, students and scientists to visually represent particle physics.
For more information and to enter enter, go to the Collision site.
