Our Projects
We currently offer three projects based around some of the research being undertaken within the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Catching Cosmic Rays: Your school will be loaned a MiniPIXEDU - a detector manufactured by ADVACAM and designed as a USB camera to detect cosmic radiation for educational use. Students will conduct experiments on cosmic-ray muons.
Please note that we can only offer this project to a limited number of schools and is only open to schools that have successfully undertaken a project with us previously.
Note that this project was previously known as SCREAM as it used a scintillator – photomultiplier tube particle detector. It was renamed because we have moved away from the use of this detection method.
Planet Hunting with Python (Exoplanets): This project will give your students experience in computer programming using the Python programming language. This is applied to data from the Kepler mission, which looks for exoplanets using the transit method.
ATLAS Open Data (Particle Physics): This project uses publicly released data from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in CERN. Students will go through the steps involved in finding the Higgs Boson, interactively utilising the statistical methods that particle physicists use to investigate fundamental physics.