Meet the scientists!

The job of Particle Physics is to study the basic building blocks of the Universe. Sometimes that means trying to understand how the particles we know about work, and sometimes it means trying to discover new ones.

I work with particles called “Neutrinos”. You’ve probably never noticed them, but more than 10 billion of them pass through your body every second! You don’t notice them, because they don’t do anything. In fact, alsmost all of them pass through the entire planet without doing anything.

The neutrinos going through your body come from the Sun, cosmic rays and nuclear reactors. But the ones I work with are made at a particle accelerator in Japan (J-PARC). It makes a beam of neutrinos and fires it right through the Earth to the other side of Japan. We have detectors at either end (ND280 and Super-Kamiokande) which tell us how the neutrinos have changed.

Neutrinos are one of the most common particles in the Unvierse, but they’re also the least understood. We study them because they should be able to answer some of the biggest questions in particle physics today: Why are some particles very heavy and others very light? Why is the Unvierse made only of matter and not anti-matter as well?

I work with scientists all over the world: in America, Canada, Cpain, Poland, Russia, Korea, Japan… so much of our communication is via e-mail. This way we can communicate cross-time zones and other people on the mailing lists can see what you’re working on.

But not e-mail isn’t very practical for many discussions, so we also hold regular phone meetings… of source with people scattered across the world there’s always someone who has to call in during the night!

Because there’s only one experiment, and it’s in Japan, my day-to-day work mostly ivolves writing computer programs. Some of these computer programs take the raw information that comes out of our detector, and try to figure out what particle were going through the detector, and how much energy they had. We call this “reconstruction” of the particles.

My other computer programs then look through this information to find a particularly rare combination of particles which no other similar experiment has yet found.

Less day-to-day, but still fairly often make visits, arrange visits to the physics department, give talks and put on demonstrations for school students, teachers, in fact anyone who wants to listen!

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a school which does not have a copy of the Periodic Table up on the wall. Even people who have very little interest in science leave school knowing what it is.

But I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Standard Model of Particle Physics up on a classroom wall. There are only 18 particles in it, but they make up everything in the periodic table, everything you’ll ever touch or see and you yourself. Usually you wouildn’t learn about them until the last year of A-level, but I think the building blocks of our Unvierse are to fascinating to leave that late.

I want to change this two ways…

First I will build an interactive website, which shows all the particles and emphasizes the simplicity of the particles, and the patterns in how they’re arranged. Clicking on any of the particles would take you to a page about each one, describing it’s key properties and how it behaves, with little snippets about who discovered them and how.

It would be viewable on computers, so that teachers can make it part of their lessons, but also viewable on tablets and phones, because you should be able to see it whenever you want to learn more about particle physics (at school, on the bus or at home)!

£500 wouldn’t normally be enough to have a website made, but I make websites for a hobby, so there would be no cost in making it. Only a small cost in putting it online ~£100 for 5 years.

With the rest of the money… I’d design a  classroom poster of the table of particles to go with the website. All the money would go into printing and distributing it to as many schools as possible (including all the schools in the Zinc Zone!). It would be colourful and exciting, enticing people to look at it, but at the same time conveying the simplicity of how few things acctually make up our Unvierse. It would also have to be resiliant enough to survive the classroom environment.

There would also be link to the website, so that those who want to find out more can.

I don’t know about you, but I spent a lot of time at school staring at the walls… everyone who has a lesson in a room with that poster up would leave school knowing what they’re made of! That would be a result.