Berkeley Lab hosts 2025 ATLAS Masterclass in particle physics data analysis

May 5, 2025 – Marsha Fenner

Berkeley Lab Physics Division News

On Saturday, April 26, Berkeley Lab's Physics Division hosted the 2025 ATLAS Masterclass for students interested in high-energy particle physics. This year, 18 high school students (freshmen through seniors) participated in a program that included presentations and discussions with Berkeley Lab scientists directly involved with the ATLAS experiment, a tour of the physics labs and experimental facilities at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), and introductory lessons from volunteer postdocs and graduate students, who coordinated a hands-on group data analysis project using real data from the ATLAS Experiment located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

“The students asked so many insightful questions and were engaged through every part of the event,” said event organizer Anne Fortman, a Physics Division postdoctoral fellow working on the ATLAS project. “It was such a rewarding and exciting experience to combine the analyzed datasets and demonstrate how new particles are discovered, and the students particularly enjoyed the opportunity to see what a real physics laboratory looks like during the ALS tour.”

Fortman was joined on this year's organizing team by Beojan Stanislaus, Liam Foster, Louis-Guillaume Gagnon, Laura Nosler, and Adam Foote. The organizers extend their gratitude to this year's volunteers (Rebecca Carney, Lukas Peron, Xiangyang Ju, Rohith Karur, and Angira Rastogi) and ALS tour guides (Ina Reichel and Moni Blum), with special thanks to Berkeley Lab's K-12 STEM Education and Outreach Program, which provided the laptops for this year's event and helped advertise it to student groups throughout the Bay Area.

With over 60 institutions participating annually, this masterclass was held as part of a series hosted on a global scale by the International Particle Physics Outreach Group, and coordinated regionally by QuarkNet, an NSF-funded organization dedicated to bringing physics research into school classrooms by providing training opportunities for both teachers and students.