Thomas McCauley
University of Notre Dame, USA
for the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations
The first and most enduring use of public data from the LHC is education. For example, since 2011 data from the four LHC experiments has been used in the international masterclasses conducted under the auspices of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group and organized by TU Dresden (Netzwerk Teilchenwelt) and QuarkNet.
The success of such programs as the masterclasses was one of the favorable factors considered by the LHC experiments when further data releases and open-access policies were discussed.
"Making the data public does not make them any simpler".
Visualize and explore events from the datasets with an interactive event display
Recently high school teachers as part of the CERN High School Teacher program successfully used CMS derived data to come up with exercises for the high-school level
Data are identified with persistent, citable digital object identifiers (DOI) and are released under the Creative Commons CC0 waiver, essentially releasing it into the public domain.
// WHAT: Fill histograms for the following attributes from the current
// globalMuon-Track:
// - p (momentum vector magnitude)
// - pt (track transverse momentum)
// - eta (pseudorapidity of momentum vector)
// - chi-square
// - ndof (number of degrees of freedom of the fit)
// - normalizedChi2 (normalized chi-square == chi-squared divided by ndof
// OR chi-squared * 1e6 if ndof is zero)
h1->Fill(it->p());
h2->Fill(it->pt());
h3->Fill(it->eta());
h4->Fill(it->phi());
h53->Fill(it->chi2());
h54->Fill(it->ndof());
h55->Fill(it->normalizedChi2());
Explore correlations between variables in the datasets with histogram tool
C++ and python notebooks available for various analyses: $\mathrm{W}$, $\mathrm{Z}$, $\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$, $\mathrm{WZ}$, $\mathrm{ZZ}$, $\mathrm{H \rightarrow WW}$, $\mathrm{Z^{'}}$