Let’s smash the proton

Professor Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli led this four day workshop for the high school students. The worshop began with a short introduction to today’s topic by Raghav, after which the students simulated particle collisions with Pythia8 and analyzed their generated data. I was walking around the classroom advising the students and answering any questions they might have about the practicalities or interpretation of the results.

The contents of the workshop are freely available at GitHub. Raghav gave a presentation detailing how the 2023 summer workshop went on the 2024 Winter Workshop of Nuclear Dynamics. They also wrote an opinion piece to Scientific American related to this workshop.