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The ATLAS Open Data Educational project

The ATLAS Collaboration's current approach on the release of datasets is intended for Education, Training and Outreach activities around the World. In order to fulfil that objective, the ATLAS Open Data project was created.  

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ATLAS Open Data project aims to provide data and tools to high-school, masters and undergraduate students, as well as teachers and lecturers, to help educate them in physics analysis techniques used in experimental particle physics. Sharing data collected by the ATLAS experiment aims to generate excitement and enthusiasm for fundamental research, inspiring physicists of the future.

This site provides introductory material and detailed information for a wide audience about the ATLAS Open Datasets and their visualisation, the analysis frameworks and Jupyter notebooks, as well as the virtual machine usage instructions.

General information​

  • The ATLAS Open Data is hosted in the ATLAS Open Data website, as well as in the CERN Open Data website and are attributed separate DOI's that allow their citation.

  • The main ATLAS-approved documents meant to be a guide on the content, properties, capabilities and limitations of the two released datasets:

Please cite accordingly.

The target audience is physics undergraduate and masters students but may also include advanced high-school students or indeed anyone with some basic understanding of particle physics and coding experience.

A comprehensive educational platform was developed featuring the 8 TeV and the more recent 13TeV dataset and a set of educational tools at a more advanced level. The objectives of this educative initiative are to provide:

  • 8 TeV proton-proton data collected by ATLAS plus associated simulated data.
  • 13 TeV proton-proton data collected by ATLAS plus associated simulated data.
  • Tools and software of varying technical difficulty to analyse the data.
  • An educational platform providing easy access to the data, software and tools with documentation in the form of step-by-step instructions for users.

You can find usage instructions, examples, applications and suggestions in the dedicated ATLAS Open Data website http://opendata.atlas.cern

With the collaboration of the CERN Open Data team, we aim to publish, preserve and document real and simulated datasets, software and virtual machines, web and desktop applications, and up-to-date exercises and documentation, all for educational purposes.

The ideal scenario is to have all the ATLAS Open Data resources replicated in both sites. We will do our best to reach this objective.

Disclaimer​

  • The ATLAS Open Data are released under the Creative Commons CC0 waiver. Neither ATLAS nor CERN endorses any works produced using these data, even if available on or linked from, this portal.
  • All data sets will have a unique DOI that you are requested to cite in any applications or documentation produced.
  • Despite being processed, the high-level primary datasets remain complex, and selection criteria need to be applied in order to analyse them, requiring some understanding of particle physics and detector functioning. The large majority of the data cannot be viewed in simple data tables for spreadsheet-based analyses.