33-101 B4: Elementary Particles - The Building Blocks of Matter
This seminar will discuss how matter is built from quarks, gluons and leptons, and how this is measured. Discussions, reading and videos will cover topics such "the structure of the proton," "particles / antiparticles," "particle physics experiments," "radiation," and "relativistic energy/momentum conservation". Students will perform a simple experiment with radioactive sources, and also write some software to analyze data from an actual particle physics experiment. Programming experience in either C or FORTRAN is required. Upon completion, students should understand how matter is put together from its most basic constituents, as well as what is not currently understood and what people hope to learn from particle physics experiments.