Sharing ATLAS data and research with young students

In recent years the International Masterclasses (IMC) featured the use of real experimental data as produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and collected by the detectors. We present ATLAS-based educational material using these data allowing high-school students to learn about properties of known particles and search for new phenomena. The ambition to bring to the “classrooms” important LHC discoveries is realised using the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Approximately 10% of the ATLAS discovery data are made available for students to search for the Higgs boson: 2 fb−1 at 8 TeV for the Z path, and 1 fb−1 at 7 TeV for the W path, in the 2014 version of IMC. The Higgs study samples constitute one third of the total sample including Z, W and other low mass resonances. The educational material is tuned and expanded to follow LHC “heartbeats”.