Lecture from CERN
On 03.28.2025 students from science club LEOO (Local Earth Observation Observatory) participated in an online Internarional Workshops on Elementary Particle Physics that had been led by research workers from CERN and Institute of Nuclear Physics from Polish Academy of Sciences from Cracow.
Elementary Particles Physics deals with the most basic components of matter and how they interact with one another. Research in this field is conducted with the use of the accelerators thanks to which are able to accelerate and collide charged particles.
The biggest accelerator in the world – Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN since the end of 2009 takes measurements to the highest energy available in the laboratory. On July 2012 experiments ATLAS and CMS announced the discovery of a new particle, Higgs bozon which is a key element missing so far in Standard Model of interactions between particles. Existence of Higgs bozon was postulated in theories explaining non-zero mass of other particles.
Experiments on LHC later proved this theory correct thanks to what their creators, François Englert and Peter W. Higgs, received the Nobel Prize in 2013.
Gathering data from LHC experiments is continued to this day to better understand the properties of Higgs bozon and particle interactions at the highest energies. There’s still a lot of unexplained phenomenon, especially those about dark matter, differences between matter and antimatter, there’s also ongoing search for new particles.
Workshops on Elementary Particle Physics are organized every year in multiple countries for high school students to help them understand the greatest achievements in this field of physics and research methods used there. Students took part in the lectures, analysis of experimental data performed by them and at the and they also attended videoconference with physicists from CERN (in Switzerland) and other students from different countries. In the videoconference we discussed our results with students from Slovakia (Bratislava), Greece (Athens), Kenya (Nairobi), and RPA (Cape Town). Next, there was time to ask questions and lastly, we had a quiz to check what we learned about elementary particles during the lectures
It was another scientific feast for members of science club LEOO.
