Search for new long-lived particles at CERN with the REINFORCE EU Citizen-Science project

Abstract

The REINFORCE EU project (Research Infrastructures FOR Citizens in Europe) engages and supports citizens to cooperate with researchers and actively contribute to the development of new knowledge for the needs of science and society. The overall aim is to bridge the gap between them, and reinforce society’s science capital. REINFORCE targets citizens of any age, without requiring prior physics or computing knowledge, and offers four “discovery demonstrators” from different areas of physics: Gravitational Wave Astronomy, Neutrino Physics, High-Energy Collider Physics, and the interplay of Cosmic Rays with Geoscience and Archaeology. The infrastructure of all demonstrators is based on Zooniverse, the most popular citizen-science platform, which is expected to reach a large number of volunteers, and motivate them to play a part in frontier scientific research. After a brief description of the demonstrators comprising REINFORCE, we present in detail the demonstrator titled “Search for new particles at CERN”, which engages citizen-scientists in searches for new elementary particles produced by the high-energy proton-proton collisions at the LHC of CERN. To make this possible, the demonstrator adopts a three-stage architecture which will be described below.