The REINFORCE EU (Research Infrastructures FOR Citizens in Europe) was a three-year-long SwafS project which engaged citizens in active collaboration with the scientists working in large research infrastructures across Europe. The overall aim was to bridge the gap between them and reinforce society’s science capital. The citizen scientists had at their disposal data from four different “discovery demonstrators” hosted on the online Zooniverse platform.
The demonstrators asked for the citizen contribution to front-end research such as: gravitational wave astronomy, deep sea neutrino telescopes, particle search at CERN and cosmic rays. The task of the citizens was to help the scientists to optimize the detectors and/or the reconstruction algorithms.
The focus of this contribution is on the demonstrator titled “Search for New Particles at CERN”, where citizen-scientists visually inspected events collected by the ATLAS detector at LHC and searched for signatures of new particles.
The results of 360,000 classifications which show that citizen scientists can carry out complicated tasks responsibly and contributed in the ATLAS searches are presented as well.
This contribution is dedicated to the memory of late Prof. S. Katsanevas, the project’s coordinator and former Director of EGO.