In mid-March, students from Murrieta Valley High School, Centennial High School (Corona), and Sage Hill High School (Newport Beach) visited the Department of Physics and Astronomy to participate in the International Particle Physics Masterclass, an annual program of the European Particle Physics Outreach Group. The Masterclass is an interactive exercise in which high school students analyze actual particle physics data collected at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the particle physics laboratory on the border of Switzerland and France. Following data analysis, the visiting students took part in a videoconference with CERN and high schools in Europe to discuss their findings. Bill Gary, second from left, professor of physics, led the Masterclass at UCR.
–Iqbal Pittalwala