ALICE Masterclass is part of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022
18.02.2022 |
On February 11, the United Nations called for the seventh International Day of Women and Girls in Science to raise awareness and visibility to equal participation and to the achievements of female scientists. To mark the occasion, scientists of the ALICE experiment invited female high-school students interested in physics nationwide to participate in an online workshop. In addition to researchers from the Universities of Münster, Munich and Frankfurt, five representatives of the ALICE research department of GSI/FAIR were also involved in the event.
Within the framework of the ALICE Masterclass, 44 female students gained an insight into the work of physicists and into data evaluation. Under the expert guidance of the scientists, they analyzed measurement data from the ALICE experiment by themselves and discussed their findings in an international video conference with researchers at CERN, in India and in Greece.
ALICE is one of the four large-scale experiments at the LHC collider at the CERN research center in Geneva and deals in particular with heavy ion collisions of lead atomic nuclei. When lead atomic nuclei collide with unimaginable impact in the LHC, conditions are created similar to the first moments of the universe. During the collisions, a so-called quark-gluon plasma is created for a very short time - a state of matter that existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. This plasma transforms back into normal matter within fractions of a second. The particles produced in the process provide information about the properties of the quark-gluon plasma. Thus, the measurements can peer into the birth of the cosmos and reveal information about the basic building blocks of matter and their interactions. (CP)
