CERN Beamline for Schools 2017 Student Experiment: Search for Isolated Fractionally Charged Particles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article was mainly written by a team of high school students that have won the CERN Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition in 2017. They had some help from professional scientists, in particular Branislav Ristic. The team had proposed to set up an experiment to search for elementary particles with a fractional electric charge. This paper describes the preparation of their proposal, experimental setup, detectors and data analysis throughout the search for such particles using a 10[Formula: see text]GeV[Formula: see text][Formula: see text] proton beam with a fixed iron target. It was clear to the team that the chance for finding such particles in a relatively simple experiment was minimal but that by doing this experiment they would learn a lot about experimental physics. Due to large amounts of noise, the result of the experiment is inconclusive. Further experimentation to search for these hypothesized particle is encouraged.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".