First International Masterclasses of ALICE held in JU

STATE TIMES NEWS

JAMMU: On the occasion of International Day of Women and Girls in Science (IDWGS), a one-day online event ‘Hands-on Particle Physics Masterclasses @JU’ was organised by the High Energy Physics (HEP) group of the Department of Physics, University of Jammu for high school/college/university girl students. It was the first time that International Masterclasses in Particle Physics was organised in India.
International Masterclasses programme is organised by Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (TU) Dresden and QuarkNet Collaboration Notre Dame in framework of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG), that is financially supported by CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (French) or European Council for Nuclear Research), TU Dresden, US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy.
The High Energy Physics (HEP) group at University of Jammu as part ALICE experiment at LHC, organised International Masterclasses for girls students in which 40 girl students registered to become part of learning experience of its kind. The event started with an inaugural session where the coordinator of the event Dr Ramni Gupta, Associate Professor of Physics in the department of Physics. The inaugural session was attended and addressed by the chairperson of ALICE-India Collaboration Dr Zubayer Ahammed from VECC, Kolkata, spokesperson of ALICE-India Collaboration Prof Bedanga Mohanty from NISER, Odhisha, Dr Despina-Hatzifotiadou outreach coordinator of ALICE experiment, Prof Anju Bhasin, and Prof S S Sambyal, Head of Physics department. Inaugural was also attended by members of ALICE-India Collaboration, participants, faculty, and scholars of the Department of Physics, University of Jammu. The resource persons for the first session (Talks & Discussions) of the event were Dr. Despina-Hatzifotiadou, Prof Anju Bhasin Professor of Physics, Dr Ramni Gupta Associate Professor and Meenakshi Sharma, Ph.D Student of HEP Group of University of Jammu.
A hands-on session was conducted by team of Ph.D students of HEP group of University of Jammu. Later in evening, participants connected to the video-conference with moderators from the CERN and shared and compared the results of the exercises with those obtained by other two institutes (CTU, Prague, and Thessaloniki, Greece) who also had organised ALICE Masterclasses. Participants of the event interacted with the moderators and asked various questions related to CERN, ALICE, and life of women in particle Physics.