Curriculum Connection: Most high school curricula stop their particle physics at protons, neutrons and electron - basically, the stuff that was known over 70 years ago and yet the media is full of quarks, string theory and the Large Hadron Collider. We can introduce these topics in good conscience by realizing that they are great examples of conservation laws, electricity and magnetism, circular motion and momentum. We can't do the experiments, but a number of the big accelerators have outreach programs that provide data and other resources that we can use.
1) Bubble
Chamber Detective
This lesson looks at photographs from CERN of charged particles moving through
a uniform magnetic field in a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber. It uses the Lorentz
force, circular motion and some conservation
laws to analyse these tracks to learn about the particles that made
them
2) Conservation
Rules
This lesson looks at particle events that do and do not occur. Students
use these to develop conservation laws for charge, baryon number
and lepton number. They also compare particle events and chemical reactions.
3)
Measuring the Mass of the Top Particle
This lesson uses conservation of momentum in 2D plus the relativistic
equations for momentum and energy to analyse some real data from Fermilab in
order to find the mass of the Top Quark.
4) Examining
The Z Particle
This lesson examines real 3D data from CERN of data generated by the Large Electron
Positron collider. The physics of the accelerator and detectors are very similar
to that of the Large Hadron collider. It is not as obviously an application
of electromagnetism and conservation laws
as the other two, but it is much more up-to-date. If you have the standard
model on your curriculm, this is definitely on topic as it looks explicitely
at the three generations of leptons and the behaviour of quarks.
5) Relativistic
Momentum
This is a resource from TRIUMF that is also placed in the relativity section.
It shows students how to measure the momenta and velocities of very fast electrons,
pions and muons. They need to use v = d/t, F = qvB and equations for circular
motion.
6) The Large Hadron Collider
There are a few suggestions here, but this resource needs more work.
Last updated July 2010