Question: you said you would make a website with the prize money what would the website include and how would it inform us about your work.

Andy Buckley answered on 4 Mar 2019:

Thanks for the question! It’s quite hard to explain to public audiences how particle physics works, because we mostly have some pre-made videos or still images. Interactive 3D displays of the particle collisions can be really good for building a feel for what’s going on without having to know all the detailed physics; here’s one I made for personal use, which you can drag around, zoom in on, etc.: http://www.ppe.gla.ac.uk/~abuckley/evt3d_zbb/evt3d_EventDisplay_info_zee_txt_000133.html

For the outreach web app, I’d really like to get someone with much (much!) better 3D programming skills than me to turn that sort of ugly display into something much more interactive where you can click on particles, be able to switch on seeing them interact with the particle detector, and so on. Once the basics are looking good, there’s oodles of room for expansion!

I’d then want to tie this in with stepped-through tutorials on how to find a Higgs boson or some speculative new particles that decay into the particles shown in these displays. At the moment this can only be done using software that’s hard to run, and private to the LHC experiments, so doing it as a web application would really open up access to everyone.