Next week, high school students from China and Brazil will descend on NDQC aiming to learn a bit about particle physics. The students will learn what exactly goes on in the CMS detector during a collision and how to analyze the data plots that the collisions produce.
Teachers and students who have already spent time analyzing some of these data plots will be helping to lead the seminar. They will attempt to walk the international students through it all the way that they learned it. For example, one skill that will be learned is how to identify particles from their invariant masses on a histogram like the one in this blog. They will find things such as the Z boson or the j/psi meson. The graph below from CMS on the Science 2.0 website shows evidence of a j/psi particle at around 3.1 GeV which is the actual weight value of a j/psi.
It is sure to be a great learning experience for these high school students and should help advance their knowledge in particle physics.