Introduction

HEPscape! is a high-energy physics escape room. It was conceived by four researchers of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) of Rome, and built up with the precious support of INFN and with the collaboration of Sapienza University of Rome. Some of the project founders are members of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration, located at the CERN experimental laboratory, in Geneva. The HEPscape! project was born out of the desire to bring the field of high-energy physics closer to the general public, made up of kids, young students and adults. For this reason, HEPscape! has traveled through Italy to reach as many people as possible, beyond the few lucky ones who had the opportunity to visit the CERN laboratory in person. In the past few years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, visits to CERN and CMS were suspended. From 2021, HEPscape! has hence offered a unique opportunity to the public to take part in a kind of virtual visit to the experimental areas of the LHC.

Physics at LHC

At the LHC, protons and heavy ions collide at unprecedented energies. The collisions occur at the core of the CMS experiment to recreate confined conditions similar to those existing a fraction of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. At LHC collisions, we can produce new particles such as the Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles and even new phenomena such as new hot and high-density states of matter. CMS physicists study such collisions to verify physical theories or discover new ones, such as the composition of dark matter in the universe or the possible existence of additional space dimensions. Experiments like CMS are crucial to understand the nature of the universe. 

In 2012 CMS, together with the ATLAS experiment, led the discovery of the last missing particle in the Standard Model – the Higgs boson –, whose existence had already been predicted in 1964 and which was only detected 60 years later. The CMS detector, made up of over 100 million individual sensors, is one of the most complex and precise scientific instruments ever built. Located 100 m underground, near the French village of Cessy, right next to the Swiss border, has been operating since 2010 and involved scientists, engineers and students from the most diverse disciplines. The components of CMS have been designed and built in institutes from all over the world, before being carried to CERN for the final assembly.

The role of escape rooms in scientific education

An escape room is a game in which a team of players must discover clues and solve riddles and questions to achieve a specific goal within a limited amount of time – namely, escaping from the room. Escape rooms can be employed to teach visitors basic or even in-depth scientific topics in an unconventional and fun way. Since the basic structure of an escape room forces visitors to solve each riddle before moving onto the next one, one can get immediate feedback on the game’s topic through a dynamic knowledge transfer with visitors. Typically, a facilitator supports visitors through their experience, helping them in case of need and stimulating discussion at the end. Among the main strengths of using escape rooms in scientific outreach we find the possibility of diversifying activities based on the visitors’ age and better engagement with respect to frontal teaching. The idea of posing challenges that force visitors to think encourages teamwork and parallel thinking. Escape rooms are often considered the best way of putting into practice the famous 4 Cs of Roekel on education: development of critical thinking, cooperation, creativity and communication.

Methodology

The HEPscape! experience starts outside the room. Visitors are welcomed in the experimental area by the facilitator – who acts as a guide of either CMS or ATLAS – just like they would be in real visits to the CERN experimental site. Indeed, given they’re entering an experimental area, visitors must wear safety helmets! Visitors enter the HEPscape! room entering through the LHC tunnel, printed in high resolution on curtains at the entrance, as shown in Figure 1:

Once inside, visitors will be guided through a virtual tour of LHC and will have to solve riddles in order to escape from the room. The virtual tour is a 360-degree experience with projections, sounds, lights and many unexpected surprises. Any element of the room could be useful for solving clues. The full experience lasts approximately 40 minutes. Each group is made up of a maximum of 25 people. There are three versions of the experience based on the participants' age: one for kids below 6, another for those between 6 and 12, and a third one for everybody else. A picture of the visitors inside the HEPscape! experience in Genoa, October 2021, is shown in FIgure 2:

Scientific description

The first thing visitors do inside HEPscape!, just like in real tours of CMS or ATLAS, is taking the elevator to reach the underground experimental area. This experience is simulated with three projectors that show real videos taken with a drone descending into one of the LHC shafts. As the elevator descends, the guide explains that LHC is the only place where, in case of emergency, one must take the elevator rather than the stairs: firstly, because the distance is too great to cover in a short time; and secondly, because those elevators are not regular ones, but have been built to work even in real emergency scenarios such as a fire. The first riddle consists in guessing how many meters the elevator has traveled down, as shown in Figure 3. Providing the right answer opens the first lock. Visitors can then wear their personal badges and continue the visit. During the game, each right answer opens a lock with the instructions for the next puzzle.

The second and third riddle of HEPscape! pose questions on how the LHC accelerator works (Figure 4):

and on how the Standard Model of particle physics describes the nature of matter (Figure 5):

During the game, two of the three projectors of HEPscape! show real videos of the CMS control room, recorded at CERN with a 360° camera with some members of the HEPscape! team featuring as real shifters. The fourth and last part of HEPscape! turns expert visitors into full-fledged particle physicists by letting them discover the Higgs boson. This is done by analyzing real event displays taken at CMS, finding the event in which a Higgs boson has been likely produced (Figure 6).

Technical description

HEPscape! is built as a closed environment which visitors should not see to avoid spoiling the surprise. Curtains at the room’s entrance – showing a picture of the LHC tunnel – are used to hide the room from sight. Three cutting-edge projectors are used and controlled through a computer via a video wall. On each projector images, videos and games are shown. LED lights are used to guide visitors in solving riddles. Lights can change colors and can be controlled remotely via Bluetooth using a tablet. The entirety of HEPscape! material can be carried in four large suitcases. It was conceived as a portable kit that can be set up in approximately two hours by three people.

Results

The HEPscape! experience has been presented for the first time in 2021 at two science fairs in Italy: the European Night of Researchers in Rome, in September, and at the Science Festival in Genoa, in October. In the former, a gazebo assembled in a public garden was used, whereas in the latter the LHC room was inside a museum. In both cases, the help of university students and PhDs was crucial to the success of the event.

Socials and ratings

To give visibility to HEPscape! and make it viral we have opened an Instagram account curated by our PhD students. We mostly post images and videos of HEPscape!. We also interview visitors and ask for their opinion on the experience. Visitors can also take selfies with an Instagram photo frame once they have completed their virtual visit. There are individual badges for each visitor with custom lanyards and gadgets with a QR code pointing to the HEPscape! website. To take feedback on the experience, we have created a rating app with a few questions which visitors can answer after exiting the room. The system is simple and can be easily used also by children and non-tech-savvy people. Figure 7 shows our HEPscape! social and rating tools.

Statistical analysis of visitors

As HEPscape! is tightly linked with LHC, we like to use the same concept of “run” as the experiment. Every data-taking period at LHC is called a “run”. At the moment, LHC has started its Run 3 in 2022. So far, HEPscape! has completed 10 runs. Considering all runs cumulatively, HEPscape! has collected over 5000 visitors, with an average of 100 visitors per day, as shown in Figure 8.

The overall reception is excellent and shows the great success of the HEPscape! experience since its very first iterations, as shown in Figure 9, where we report user satisfaction by age range.

Conclusions

Despite the difficult pandemic situation Italy had to face in 2021, the INFN Rome group came up with a novel outreach activity in the form of an educational science-themed escape room, HEPscape!. This is – to the creators’ knowledge – the first high-energy physics virtual experience in the form of an escape room. Today, HEPscape! is also present in the INFN groups of Perugia and Padova. The three kits have managed to cover extensively the Italian territory, and plans are underway to export the project abroad in the months to come.

Acknowledgements    

The HEPscape! project leaders would like to thank INFN, represented by A. Nisati and G. Chiarelli. We also thank the INFN communication and administration offices of INFN for the valuable help in realizing the project. A special thanks goes to Paolo Pani and Sapienza University of Rome for their continuous support to the activity.

We also thank the communication office of INFN Section of Padova, the multimedia group of the Department of Physics and Astrophysics of Università degli Studi di Padova, Chiara Sirignano, the students, the PhDs, the technologists and the researchers of Padova and Milano Bicocca. A special thanks goes to Cecilia Collà Ruvolo for the help and sharing, but especially for believing in the project and in the team

We would like to end this document by thanking all the students which have contributed to the realization of HEPscape!, hoping that their support will continue in the coming years of activity. Students and PhDs represent a precious asset to the project, as they contribute to it with their great enthusiasm and endless energy.