Gravitational Wave noise hunting

Gravitational Wave noise hunting will develop a cutting-edge citizen science programme by providing public access to GW antenna data, including environmental data, for an open-data project.

The sensitivity of GW detectors is limited by several types of noise and requires recognition on how they affect GW data is crucial to understand their origin and eliminate them. The result of this activity of noise hunting and profiling is crucial to be more sensitive to GW Signals, including those that are not modelled by general relativity formula, such as those from the explosion of supernovae.

Citizen scientists will contribute to this activity by looking at chunks of data and identify the presence of noise, and this outcome will serve as a basis to train machine learning algorithms that will automatically recognize and isolate noise in GW data. The same approach can also be used for seismic applications and/or earthquake. The team is already working in collaboration with the team of GravitySpy, a highly successful citizen science project base on recognition of transient noise sources called glitches. The experience of the LIGO Gravity-SPY programme will be central here. The University of Oxford has many Zooniverse resources and technologies than can be usefully deployed here. In the framework of the “Gravitational Wave noise hunting” demonstrator, the option is to develop multi-messenger techniques in citizen’s science will be investigated.

Deep Sea Hunter

Deep Sea Hunters will invite citizens to optimize the KM3NeT neutrino telescope against sources of environmental noise which have never been systematically studied, while engaging in the exciting world of neutrino astronomy.

Deep underwater neutrino telescopes as KM3Net measure neutrino events as well as environmental events that constitute “noise” for the neutrino searches. These environmental events range from biological bioluminescene, to acoustic signals from mammals and or earthquakes. The Deep-Sea hunters citizen science demonstrator will exploit the “eyes” and the “ears” of the KM3NeT detector in order to support KM3NeTs scientists to increase their efficiency in their neutrino detection algorithms, while gaining a greater insight of the unexplored deep marine environment. In the framework of REINFORCE, time sequences of the optical counting rates on the KM3NeT “eyes”, its optical modules containing photomultiplier tubes able to measure visible light at a single photoelectron level, will be made available to the general public in order to monitor ambient bioluminescence. Citizens will be invited to classify in a systematic way the various types of waveforms observed.

This study can be extended to monitor the seasonal variations of the amount of bioluminescence as well as to catalogue the different contributing species. Furthermore, the “ears” of the KM3NeT neutrino telescope, acoustics hydrophones located on the main detection units, will provide citizens with time sequences of the acoustical signals of the KM3NeT and ask them to classify in a systematic way the various types of waveforms observed.

Search for New Particles at the LHC

Search for New Particles at the LHC will engage citizens in the quest of the Large Hadron Collider of CERN for the discovery of the ultimate structure of matter as well as particle theories beyond the Standard Model.

The discovery of the Higgs boson, in July 2012, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN was a major scientific achievement and the culmination of more than 40 years of theoretical and experimental research into the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. While the SM Higgs has been discovered, there are several theories Beyond Standard Model (BSM), such as Supersymmetry, which open a window for even more significant new discoveries. Recently, the LHC experiments have made available a significant portion of their collected data through the Open Data initiative.

In this demonstrator, we propose to develop a series of Citizen Science projects in which the public will look for evidence of undiscovered particles. For this, we intend to use our expertise in developing specialized software for displaying and analyzing ATLAS data. HYPATIA, which has been developed by the IASA team, is used every year by thousands of high school students during the IPPOG International Masterclasses.

We plan to build upon the highly successful HiggsHunters project by developing a tool that will allow the citizen scientists to not only classify static images but also to interact with the event display, select specific tracks, calculate invariant masses etc. There are several particle decays, such as photon conversion, which we believe may be more accurately identified by humans rather than algorithms. It is our intention to ascertain whether this is true for those specific cases. Furthermore, the aggregation of data from thousands of Citizen Scientists will produce histograms which can indicate the possible existence of new particles. In this case we can work with the researchers of the ATLAS experiment to further analyze and confirm the results. The citizen scientist’s performance will be monitored and compared to an algorithm that will be developed to server as a baseline. Users will be able to not only receive feedback but also draw our attention to interesting events requiring further investigation.

Cosmic Muons Images

Interdisciplinary studies with Geoscience and Archaeology has the goal to show how the technology developed to study fundamental physics can be applied to the development of frameworks that may have a significant impact on society. It will invite citizens to utilize the Atmospheric Muons’ unique potential to probe structures and provide insight in a series of issues, ranging from volcano live monitoring to applications in archaeology or use for non- invasive and non-destructive control processes in the industry. The detection of those particles after any type of target allows therefore the characterization of the distribution and the density of the matter inside the target, as it is done for instance in medical imaging with X-rays. There is a strong societal impact of this technique, which is mostly passive and therefore adapted to any field of investigation: controls, risks assessment, hazards management.

In the framework of REINFORCE, this demonstrator will provide citizens with open data detected with distributed networks of cosmic ray detectors in order to perform inquiries at the interplay between cosmic ray research and its applications.