P3

P3 Particle Physics Playground

Repo of particle physics data from CMS and other experiments with code and tutorials on how to interact with these data.

View on GitHub

Download Zip Tar

About P3 Particle Physics Playground

Overview

This site provides exercises, mostly using real data from experiments, that teach particle physics, mostly from the experimental side.

This site is not meant to be a fully comprehensive tutorial. The ideal student will have learned the basic concepts elsewhere (classroom setting, mentor, independent study) and then will use these exercises to test their understanding of the concepts and to develop some sense of how "real scientists" are doing this work in the field.

These exercises are built around the Python programming language, specifically the the iPython notebook. Anyone who uses these exercises should familiarize themselves with both of these products.

A standard work flow would be to clone the Github repository and then run the notebooks, editing them as they go along. By actually performing the calculations themselves, the user will get the most out of this project.

And most importantly, have fun with it!

Contributors

Siena College
Physics Department
Siena College

Compact Muon Solenoid
CMS Experiment
CERN

Links

Compact Muon Solenoid

CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) at CERN

Exercises

Particle Physics

Philosophy

Exercise 1

Discovering Particles

Exercise 2

Learning about particles and their properties

Exercise 3

Discovering More Particles

More Exercises

Coming soon...

Philosophy

  • Identify your learning objectives. Every exercise should identify the learning goals at the top. This allows the user/student to know what they will be getting out of the exercise and whether or not it will be useful to them. It has the additional benefit of forcing the author to consider how they will structure the exercise and what they want the user to come away with.
  • Provide REAL data. While it is often useful to use Monte Carlo to emphasize certain aspects of the data analysis with a more controlled dataset, I feel it is important to encourage experiments to provide their data to the public. If an experiment wants this site to host some of their data and exercises, I would require at least some of the data actually come from their experiment.

This project is licensed using the MIT Open Source license. This means that any of you anywhere can make a copy of this site and host it elsewhere. I am totally cool with that.

However, it would be great to have some common repository for different experiments to have their data used to teach people science and train the next generation of particle physicists. I am therefore happy to include data and exercises (at any level!) from interested individuals. To this end, I have some helpful suggestions (and requirements!) for those of you who would like to contribute.