Introducing The Particle Lab
We've spent the last while building something we think belongs on a science communication site more than a wall of text ever could: a place to play with the physics, not just read about it.
The Particle Lab is six small interactive tools, all in one page:
- A 3D collision visualizer — fire two proton beams down the pipe, watch them collide, and inspect the decay products.
- A Feynman diagram builder — place vertices, draw fermion/photon/gluon/boson lines by hand, and export your diagram as PNG or SVG.
- An invariant mass analyzer — generate LHC-style event samples and watch a resonance peak emerge from the background, just like the 2012 Higgs discovery plots.
- A particle properties explorer — search the Standard Model, then bend the "what-if" dials to see what changes if a particle's mass or lifetime were different.
- A decay chain simulator — pick a parent particle and step through real branching ratios, generation by generation.
- An event selector and lab notebook — apply kinematic cuts to a mock event stream, write up your observations, and generate a printable report.
Nothing here needs an account or a download — it's all client-side, autosaves to your browser, and runs on the same page you're reading this on. Go collide something.