The confirmation of the existence of the famous Higgs boson has caused a special interest in all particle physics. Now, CERN has just announced the opening of an Open Data Portal (a data portal) where all the real collision data produced at the LHC are made public and freely available.
This announcement is of enormous importance both for the scientific community and for education. At a research level, it will offer scientists from all over the world the possibility of knowing up to the last value of the famous collisions of particles at an enormous speed; At an educational level it will allow ordinary students and citizens to learn more about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
As the CEO of CERN, Rolf Heuer , explained, “The launch of the CERN Open Data Portal is an important step for our organization. The data from the LHC program is some of the most valuable we have, and today we are beginning to share it openly with the world. We hope that this openness of data will help and inspire the international scientific community, including scientific students and citizens. “
The first high-level data package available belongs to the CMS ( Compact Muon Solenoid ) experiments carried out in 2010. In fact, the data from this work will be released after three years of study by the LHC researchers themselves.
As Kati Lassila-Perini, CMS data maintenance coordinator points out, “it is a new experience and we are curious to know who is going to use it or what for . For this reason we have prepared different tools and examples that stimulate the creativity of external users and will help them to gain experience in its use ”.
All the data available in OpenData.cern.ch are shared under the Creative Commons license , the data and the software carry a unique identifying number to be able to be cited in scientific articles. The free software necessary to read and analyze the published data is also available, together with the corresponding documentation.
