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Particle Physics

Elementary particle physics is the study of the universe at the smallest distance scale possible. It addresses questions such as:

  • What are the fundamental building blocks of the universe?
  • How do these fundamental constituents interact with each other?
  • Why is the mass of the Higgs boson unnaturally small?
  • What is the physics beyond the current theory of particle physics?
  • Is there a limiting smallest distance scale to the universe?
  • How can we integrate quantum mechanics and gravity?
  • Why is there much more matter in the universe than anti-matter?

In the sessions on elementary particles physics, you will have the opportunities to see how physicists go about addressing some of these issues. You will use event displays to analyze events produced in collisions of high-energy neutrinos with matter in neutrino experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago, IL. You will use coding to understand how physicists design neutrino detectors and interpret the data.

Neutrinos are one of the most abundant fundamental particles in our universe but remain among the least understood, with profound open questions surrounding their properties. They are notoriously difficult to detect, interacting only weakly with matter; in fact, while their existence was first hypothesized in the 1930s, it was not until 1956 that they were first detected. Since then, experiments to determine the properties of the three known types of neutrinos have found even more surprising behavior, such as neutrino oscillations — where neutrinos produced as one type are later detected as another. With their elusive nature and unusual properties, neutrinos may be the key to uncovering a more fundamental theory of nature than our current Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Working with fellow students, you will search for particles such as muons, devise selection criteria to separate signals of interest from the backgrounds, and learn how we can use different kinds of particle detectors to understand what is happening inside atoms and nuclei. In the process, you’ll learn about the analysis tools that physicists use to separate out signal from the background in the particle physics data.