HEP data in education and outreach efforts

ORAL

Abstract

The High Energy Physics (HEP) community has recognized that data preservation is an important part of our future and has organized an international working committee to address this. Beyond the continued data mining which can take place, there is a great opportunity to use these datasets as teaching tools, both for university students and an interested general public. The {\sl B{\scriptsize A}B{\scriptsize AR}} experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has a dedicated group working on the preservation effort; the education and outreach effort is a significant goal of this group. Retention of knowledge and conceptual understanding is enhanced by active participation in problem solving -- a challenge that can be addressed with more involved projects than currently available to the general public from the HEP outreach centers. We are developing a framework that will make subsets of the {\sl B{\scriptsize A}B{\scriptsize AR}} dataset available to others, along with computing tools and tutorials, so that interested parties can work through either parts or the whole of a variety of analyses. With the proper framework, this may be used by other HEP experiments as a way to make their physics available and teachable beyond our community. The scope of this project may be extended to teach the next generation of particle physicists, who may lack immediate data, by providing them with datasets with which to prepare themselves for upcoming experiments.

Authors

  • Matt Bellis

    Stanford University