KITPC Holds Its Inaugural Outreach Program

(Originally published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences)

July 30, 2012

The first outreach program of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics China at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KITPC-CAS) entitled “LHC & Cosmic Rays, Real Particles & Real Data” was successfully held during Jul 16-27, 2012. The outreach was jointly organized by the KITPC, the QuarkNet Center of U.S., the State Key Laboratory of Theoretical Physics (SKLTP), the University of CAS, the Beijing Teenager Science and Technology Club and the Society of Cultivating Innovators. The four education specialists from the U.S. QuarkNet Center were invited to be the distinguished teachers for the outreach program.

There were 70 students and teachers from 13 high schools in Beijing and Jiangsu Province participating in the program, such as the high school affiliated to the Renmin University, the Beijing No. 4 high school, Nanjing Foreign Language School etc. During the two weeks’ activities, the students worked with master teachers from the United States, used the real particle physics hardware and web-based “e-Labs” to study cosmic rays and analyze real data from the CMS Detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. They built up a cosmic ray detector by themselves, got it working and took real data; they joined an international collaboration of high school teachers and students who share data through the e-Lab in a global Cosmic Ray research community and learned about particle physics and then looked for phenomena in recent CMS data. Several public science lectures were given during the outreach by local physicists, such as “From Quarks to Cosmos ” by the director of KITPC, academician Yue-Liang Wu, “Neutrino Physics” by Prof. Miao Li from ITP , “Accelerators and Detectors” by Prof. Wei-Guo Li from IHEP and “Cosmic Ray Physics” by Prof. Zhen Cao from IHEP.

The KITPC outreach program is a new mode to integrate science with education, and select and cultivate talents. The KITPC outreach develops a series of scientific activities including public science lectures and science research group classes in order to popularize natural science, arouse interest in science and improve the scientific research abilities among the students and teachers of Universities and high schools. The main purpose of the KITPC outreach is to create a loving–and-devoted–to-science environment, extend vision and broaden the depth of scientific thinking, improve teaching abilities and cultivate talents for the scientific innovations.