This web site intends to introduce radioactivity and its applications to the general public. It has been created and maintained by physicists with the help of the Science Editor EDP-Sciences (EDITIONS DE PHYSIQUE) and with the help of the Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et Physique des Particules (IN2P3).

This video concentrates on the LHC and the strangeness of our universe it is designed to study. Subjects include
What happens within the LHC
Theory of relativity
How "Sat Nav" or Global Positioning Systems (GPS) work for cars and the possibility of errors in their measurement
Extra dimentions
Higgs field
Mass
Mini black holes
mini big bangs in ALICE and the quark gluon plasma
Produced by: Mannmade Productions
Director: Chris Mann
08:02 min. / 10 September 2008 / CERN Copyright

The Standard Model of particle physics is one of the most successful theories in physics and describes the fundamental interactions between elementary particles. It is encoded in a compact description, the so-called 'Lagrangian', which even fits on t-shirts and coffee mugs. This mathematical formulation, however, is complex and only rarely makes it into the physics classroom.

Particle builder is a particle physics board game developed by Lachlan McGinness, HarriLeinonen and Rowan McGinness. The game is designed to familiarise students (aged 16-18 years) in groups of 2-3 players with the elementary particles in the standard model. The game involves playing cards which represent elementary particles and comparing the properties of these elementary particles. The game has different stages or levels. Beginning players should start on level 1 and as they become more familiar with the particles they can progress through the levels.

Scattering experiments (e.g. the gold foil experiment) are important research tools of nuclear and particle physics. They help us to study interactions between particles and to obtain information about the structure of matter. Below, we present activities using a mechanical 3D-printable scattering experiment. The activities include different difficulty levels, in which high-school students can study scattering qualitatively, semi-quantitatively or quantitatively.

Particles coming from the universe are crossing the earth all the time – they are harmless but invisible to us. Cloud Chambers are detectors which make the tracks of the particles visible. Some decades ago these detectors were used at CERN in the first particle physics experiments. The following instructions will help you to build your own Cloud Chamber at home. You will also find explanations on what you can see in the chamber and what the source for this particles is. In addition, we link to similar resources, give advice on radioactive sources (e.g.

This is number 9 of a series of journals. 9th issue, published in September 2016. Complete title of journal is "Élémentaire - de l’infiniment petit à l’infiniment grand." Élémentaire ("Elementary") is an outreach journal in French whose eight issues cover the particle physics, from the atom to the discoveries expected at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Each issue contains about 15 recurring articles which present the stakes of the physics of the infinitely small, such as the tools and the methods used to study this physics.

The discovery of the Higgs boson came at the end of a long journey, where the direction was marked, but the road had to be built. What now? Now the physicists are looking out onto a world we don’t know, where there are no paths, and even the directions to be followed aren’t very clear. They know that something "new" has to exist, because only 5% of the matter in the Universe may be attributed to known physics.

This textbook is part of a four-volume series of teaching material on particle physics developed by the German Netzwerk Teilchenwelt in cooperation with the Joachim Herz Foundation.

ATLAS is a modern detector for elementary particles located are CERN. It allows to trace particles that are generated at proton collisions at the LHC. This package allows you to understand the fundamental principles of the detector. The main document consists of worksheets, videos, a presentation, questions and answers on particle detectors.