Particle Physics Playground
A place for the curious to meet the contemporary
Particle physics activities...with real data!
Jump in right away with some exercises from real world data from accelerators and detectors to experience first-hand how particles are discovered in real life!
Exercises are built around python coding, using Jupyter notebooks and hosted using Google's Colab environment, meaning they will run on almost any computer including Chromebooks. Simple functions are provided showing you how access these datasets.
For more guidance on how to use these materials, check out our Documentation and help page which has step-by-step examples of how to understand the python code and data format for each experiment.
This website is built and maintained by faculty and students at Siena College and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
CMS - Identifying particles by their invariant mass
Calculate the invariant mass from the 4-momentum to determine what types of particles were detected.
CMS - Discover new particles using muon pairs
Use relativistic kinematics to infer the existence of new particles that decay to pairs of muons. Investigate the properties of these particles.
CLEO - Search for D mesons
Make use of the provided Monte Carlo samples to understand how to reconstruct a D-meson in a variety of decay modes. Then apply your search to collider data.
Icecube -Visualize neutrino interactions
Visualize the interactions of neutrinos with the Antarctic ice using open data from the Icecube experiment.
BaBar - Reconstruct short-lived particles
Make use of the provided data to search for a variety of short-lived particles.
CMS - Top quark reconstruction
Reconstruct the top quark using CMS open data and compare to the predictions from the provided Monte Carlo samples
For the classroom!
Here we list exercises, or variations on the same exercise, that work well for classroom assignments. We try to suggest a level of understanding..
In all cases, students should have already or are being taught, basic python skills like plotting and potentially loops or how to work with numpy arrays.
The physics concepts are introduced in the activities, but a student will benefit if they have a good mentor helping them work through the activities and the science behind them.
If you are an instructor, please reach out to us at mbellis@siena.edu for solutions.
Lifetimes of relativistic particles
Learn about the lifetimes of particles and how what we perceive is affected by time dilation. How does this tell us what we can and cannot detect directly in our experiments and what must be inferred?
Masses of particles and discovery date
Students are asked to plot the masses of the elementary particles versus the date of discovery and discuss any patterns they observe.
CMS - reconstruct dimuon invariant masses - simplified
Read in energy and momentum of muon pairs from a .csv file. Students are asked to compare the predictions of relativistic versus non-relativistic kinematics.
Having Any Problems?
Check out the Documentation and Help page for any problems or difficulties with the code, physics, or the exercises! Whether it is you want a helping hand with the coding or want to know if how to use the code format or just want to do these experiments locally in your computer, check out Documentation and Help!
CMS Open Data - NEW!
Want to go into much more depth and start working with 3 petabytes of data from the CMS experiment?
Check out the most recent CMS Open Data Workshop to explore how to perform new analyses with data released to the publc by the CMS collaboration on the CERN Open Data Portal.
CMS - NanoAOD with particle flow candidates - Access!
CMS - nanoAOD with particle flow candidates - Analyze!