Particle Physics Game

Inspiration

(Daniel) I love particle physics and am currently taking a course in it, so I decided to apply what I've learned to create a game that could help excite and educate other people in particle physics. The process of reconstructing particle tracks in a cloud chamber always felt cool to me, so we decided to make it into a game people could play.

What it does

This application procedurally generates tracks of subatomic particles as how they would appear in a cloud chamber, a type of early particle detector. Tracks may split or change as the particles decay, and some are invisible because those particles are undetectable. Users are given a keyboard of subatomic particles, and are asked to identify what kind of particle made each track. This places them in the role of early physicists, piecing together clues to determine what particles were detected.

How we built it

We built this project in Python, JS, and HTML+CSS, making a web app that runs entirely on the client.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges on how to integrate Python and JS - we wanted to do all the physics calculations in Python, while running the web app on JS. We reached a compromise of running some of the web app stuff on Python, as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of making a working web app that procedurally generates particle interactions. Some of the important elements of cloud chambers (like missing momentum from neutrinos) can be demonstrated using this program.