Outreach activities of the Extreme Energy Events Project

The Extreme Energy Events Project (EEE) represents a breakthrough in outreach activities in Cosmic Ray Physics: high school students are protagonists of an experiment to measure Extensive Air Showers at ground. They start their experience at CERN with the construction of the three high performing Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers constituting the telescope that is then installed inside their school;then they take care of the telescope operation and data analysis. Presently 60 telescopes are installed in Italy and, since 2014, coordinated data taking have been performed during each school year providing a huge amount of candidate muon tracks. Every year hundreds of students and teachers are involved in the activities directly correlated to EEE. The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly affected the experimental activities of the EEE Project. However in the last two years the online activities were strengthened, with an intense programme of collaboration meetings, masterclasses, and hugely successful topical seminars. Starting from the fall of 2021, the improvement of epidemiological situation made it possible to start some of the EEE activities in presence. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Outreach and educational activities within the EEE cosmic ray network

The Extreme Energy Events (EEE) network consists in a sparse array of telescopes based on Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers, installed in high school buildings all over the Italian territory and at CERN. Besides the many research activities concerned with extensive air shower detection, long distance correlation studies and additional physics results obtained during the last decade, the EEE project is extensively employed for educational and outreach activities, constituting a unique opportunity to promote a fruitful and close collaboration between students, high-school teachers and researchers. The involvement is at all levels, from the construction of the chambers during short stages at CERN over the past 15 years, with the participation of several hundred high-school students and teachers, to the installation, monitoring and data taking with the telescopes by high-school teams, to masterclasses, physics lectures, data analysis sessions and joint discussions on the results and their interpretation. Recent developments of the EEE network led to the installation and use of additional detectors in the Arctic region and on board of sailing ships, to measure the cosmic ray flux over large latitude intervals. Periodical remote and in presence (pre-Covid era) meetings allowed in these years a large participation (several thousand people) from the high-school community to the EEE activities. National and local outreach initiatives in cosmic ray physics are also carried out around Italy by the EEE network, as a contribution to the dissemination of science among young people. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

The Extreme-Energy Events Project: a bridge between school and professional research

The Extreme-Energy Events (EEE) Experiment is a cosmic ray observatory based on a network of detecting stations distributed over the Italian territory and at CERN. A station of the network, called “telescope”, consists of three superimposed Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs), each one covering a surface of about 1.5 m2, used with the same technology as the time-of-flight detector of the ALICE experiment at CERN-LHC. Data are collected and sent in real time to the INFN-CNAF computer center for reconstruction and analysis. The large area covered by the network, ranging from Southern Italy up to the CERN laboratories, was achieved with the decision to install the detectors inside high schools, involving students and teachers in a modern experiment within a unique program. This very coexistence of scientific activity and outreach represents the uniqueness of the EEE Project. The outreach programme is articulated in several initiatives, each encoding the different aspects of the research activity normally expected in a high-energy physics experiment. Students are involved in detector construction at CERN, installation in school, and in the commissioning of the station when data taking starts. Once the detector reaches a steady working regime, students are requested to monitor on a daily basis the performance of the telescope and report any failure. In parallel to the hardware-related operations, students learn how to perform the analysis of EEE data under the supervision of their teachers and of the EEE researchers, supporting the scientific output of the experiment. Every month students report progress and issues in a dedicated online meeting open to all schools and to the EEE researchers. Beside this monthly appointment, in the pre-COVID era an in-person meeting was taking place twice per year, hosted by the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture in Erice or by a school or institution involved in the project. During a three-day, students attend masterclasses and take part in measurement campaigns, disseminating their results by submitting contributions to important outreach-oriented journals (such as the Italian Giornale di Fisica). © Copyright owned by the author(s)