CMS Bulletin

EDUCATION AND OUTREACH

An estimated audience of a billion people! An incredible statement that summarises the extent to which the discovery of the Higgs-like boson announced on 4 July reached the world. From regional newspapers to worldwide journals and television/radio programmes, news spread fast and wide: this was probably the biggest scientific news item in history. The CMS Communication Group played a 5-sigma-significant role in producing and disseminating information, images, videos etc. to accompany the announcement. The CMS Statement on our search for the Standard Model Higgs boson was translated into 24 languages by our very own CMS physicists, and downloaded more than 100,000 times, with parts of the text appearing verbatim in nearly 10,000 news articles. Event displays –– static and animated –– showing candidate SM Higgs decays featured on the front covers of newspapers and magazines and appeared on hundreds of television shows. CMS physicists around the world, at CERN and Melbourne in particular, made use of these materials when being interviewed by the world’s press. Social media was also used to good effect, with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube being updated regularly before/during/after the CERN seminar and throughout the week of ICHEP. An estimated 5 million people saw the Twitter message “we have observed a new boson….” on CERN’s account, a figure helped enormously through re-tweets by the public and celebrities (including MC Hammer and Will.I.Am).

Maintaining the attention of the public following 4 July is obviously not an easy task. But regular CMS News items on our website, accompanied by announcements on our social media, have helped see a steady increase in people following CMS activities, sharing the information and, crucially, talking about it through these media. And following a few trials at CERN and one in ICHEP, Google+ “Hangouts” are now a weekly activity with participation from CMS physicists as well as from other LHC (and non-LHC) experiment’s scientists and theorists. The audiences for these live Q&A sessions are growing rapidly – helped by advertising from some popular science-focused Facebook groups – and the resulting YouTube videos are being watched by thousands.

The number of visitors to CMS at P5, Cessy, has increased by more than a factor of 3 in 2012 compared with 2011, reaching more than 10,000. This is expected to double in 2013, not including the planned Open Days in September. To enhance the visitor experience many new exhibits have been introduced, including a 1:1 photo of CMS (similar to that in B40) and a 4m x 4m animated aerial view of the LHC ring, showing proton acceleration and collision. A detailed interactive 1:20 model of CMS has now arrived at CERN and will be displayed at P5 from early next year.

A number of highly-detailed images of the CMS detector have been produced by Tai Sakuma using the Google “Sketchup” package. One of these images has been used in a CMS article in “Science” magazine that summarises our Higgs search (due to be published on 21 December) whilst a series of others showing a zoom into the detector has been printed and displayed at P5. Tom McCauley has also used Sketchup to render CMS event displays, with good results. CMS data are also being read into the Unity game engine, as used by the Camelia package that aims to display events from all LHC experiments in the near future.

Another Google product has also been exploited to showcase the worldwide collaboration involved in the construction of parts of the CMS detector. These Google Earth movies are available on the CMS website, along with many other multimedia materials, including some presentations for the public. The popular animated “slice” through CMS, showing how different particles interact, has also been updated with a dedicated Powerpoint version that works on OS X and Windows operating systems.

On the Education side, activities based on analysing real CMS data are going from strength to strength. A new web page has been produced that details one of the main uses –– the so-called “Masterclasses” –– and a tutorial on this subject was given to the CMS Collaboration during a recent WGM. In addition to being able to view and analyse large samples of dilepton and lepton+ME_T events over a wide mass range, a set of “golden” Higgs candidates will soon be available.

As Christmas is fast approaching, CMS has the perfect gifts for friends and family: a 2013 calendar and some specially designed Swiss chocolates. Both are available from the CMS Secretariat.

Finally, the CMS Communications Group is undergoing some personnel changes. Achille Petrilli has taken over from Lucas Taylor as head of the group. Ellie Rusack (DocDB expert and producer of the Google Earth videos) has moved to pastures new, and Vidmantas Zemleris (web-site technical guru) has joined the CMS computing group. And after more than a decade being responsible for CMS Education and Outreach, Dave Barney is stepping down. We wish them all the best in their future endeavours.