Hands on CERN is the 2005 Webby Awards winner in the Science category. Webby Awards >>.
Scientific American rated Hands on CERN one of the best physics sites in 2004.
With the Hands on CERN education project it is possible to explore the fundamental building blocks of nature - the quarks and leptons - through particle collisions occurring in the DELPHI experiment at CERN and discover the scientists' modern view of Microcosm summarised in the Standard Model. Particle collisions are used to study the smallest building blocks in Nature - the quarks and the leptons.
Some of these build up the world we see around us, some existed naturally only at the beginning of time, the Big Bang, but are now produced in high energy collisions at a few large physics laboratories in the world. The scientific data come from the DELPHI experiment at the CERN Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP). The LEP accelerator was closed down in November 2000, but until then it provided high energy collisions between electrons and positrons, the antiparticle of the electron. The LEP experiments study the production and decay of the Z and W particles, the mediators of the weak interaction. Another hot subject is the search for the Higgs particle. Towards the end of the LEP era the collision energy was pushed up to around 210 GeV in order to increase the chance for finding the Higgs particle. _____________________________________________________________
Publications:
Hands on CERN: an education project on Internet using real high energy particle collisions
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Erik Johansson and Tord Malmgren, Physics Education 34/5(1999)286 |
Science Bringing Students Together|
J. Engstedt, R.Jacobsson, K.E.Johansson, A. Marshall and M.Mulligan, Physics
Education 35/2 (2000)86 |
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