Over the past four months, and together with Christian Klein-Boesing, Marcus Mikorski and a few others, we have been running a workshop for high-school and early-university students to design and build the ALICE Experiment at CERN in LEGO bricks.
As part of the weekly meetings we had with the students we also introduced basic concepts of particle, heavy-ion and detector physics.
The workshop series was organised and funded by the ErUM-FSP T01 project “Expansion of ALICE at the LHC: experiments with the ALICE detector at CERN”, which in turn is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
The first models in real-live bricks are foreseen to be build end of June 2021 at Goethe University Frankfurt and University of Münster, with both their ALICE groups taking a leading role in this effort.
The designs and parts lists will be made available on the Build Your Own Particle Detector website to join the already existing LEGO models of other LHC experiments.
Here’s a few rough teaser renderings from the current state of affairs …
Stay tuned for more updates to come soon!
[edit] The project has also been presented at the spring meeting of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) that started today.