During the months of March and April every year, high-school learners around the world are invited to research institutes and universities for a day-long programme to experience life at the forefront of basic scientific research.

These International Masterclasses give learners the opportunity to become particle physicists for a day. During a Masterclass, participants work with data from experiments at CERN´s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), under the supervision of physicists. The Masterclasses this year were organised for 1 March to 11 April and attracted students from 52 countries worldwide.

iThemba LABS invited 42 learners from various high schools around the City of Cape Town to take part in the Masterclasses. Learners came from a diverse array of schools, ranging from the townships of Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Phillipi to Stellenbosch and Brackenfell. The daylong event started with learners being introduced to particle physics, particle accelerators and the LHC at CERN.

Learners undertook hands-on activities that allowed them to analyse, measure and consolidate actual data from the LHC experiments. The highlight of the day was a video conference to discuss and share data with participating counterpart learners from Warsaw (Poland), Dakhar (Bangladesh) and the moderators at CERN.

International Masterclasses are led by Technical University Dresden and QuarkNet, in close cooperation with the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG). IPPOG is an independent group of outreach representatives from countries involved in the research at CERN and other leading research laboratories. The group’s goal is to make particle physics more accessible to the public.

Particle physics is one of the most important emerging fields in science. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in summer 2012 led to a huge media echo and large public interest. International Masterclasses meet this interest and offer high-school learners the chance to explore this field of cutting-edge physics by working with recent, authentic data. The basic idea of the annual programme is to let students work as much as possible like real scientists. “Students get a taste of how modern physics research works by working directly with particle physicists and using real LHC data,” says the head of the programme and Physics Professor Michael Kobel, from Technical University Dresden.

Four experiments (namely, ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb) made data available for educational use within the programme. “During the day students understand how a scientific discovery can be claimed,” Kobel points out.

Scientists at about 210 universities and laboratories in 52 countries worldwide host International Masterclasses at their home institutions. New participants in the programme for this year came from Bangladesh, Georgia, Montenegro, Russia, and Rwanda. The worldwide participation reflects the international collaboration in particle physics.