British Science Festival 2010
Event team: Matthew Arnold, Karl Harrison, Alex Harrold, Cristina Lazzeroni, Roman Lietava, Jimmy McCarthy, Mark Slater, Orlando Villalobos-Baillie, Nigel Watson, John Wilson
The Particle-Physics Group organised the event Particle physics and the mysteries of the early Universe for the 2010 British Science Festival, held in Birmingham during the week 14-19 September.
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| British Science Festival 2010 |
Festival events at University of Birmingham |
The particle-physics event was run twice, on 16th September as part of the University of Birmingham's Young People's Programme, and on 17th September for a general audience. The first part of the event was an interactive talk, where Cristina Lazzeroni outlined the aims and methods of particle physics, and members of the audience were invited to take part in demonstrations of the key concepts. Participants then had the chance to wander around activity stands, which offered a number of possibilities:
- quiz researchers about their work;
- learn about the latest developments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC);
- detect particles using a cloud chamber and a spark chamber;
- explore a replica of the control room for ALICE, one of the four main LHC experiments;
- interact with the world's largest computing grid, developed to enable analysis of the petabytes of data recorded each year by the LHC experiments;
- try out a prototype of a new computer game, Particle-Physics Manager, where the player takes charge of a particle-physics laboratory, aiming to discover the Higgs boson.
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| Slides for talk (pdf, ppt) | 16th September 2010 | 17th September 2010 |