Many teenagers dream about getting the keys to their first car. Last month, a group of high schoolers got access to their first beam of accelerated particles at CERN.
As part of its 60th anniversary celebration, CERN invited high school students from around the world to submit proposals for how they would use a beam of particles at the laboratory. Of the 292 teams that submitted the required “tweet of intent,” 1000-word proposal and one-minute video, CERN chose not one but two groups of winners: one from Dominicus College in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and another from the Varvakios Pilot School in Athens, Greece.
The teams travelled to Switzerland in early September.
“Just being at CERN was fantastic,” says Nijmegen student Lisa Biesot. “The people at CERN were very enthusiastic that we were there. They helped us very much, and we all worked together.”
The Beam Line for Schools project was the brainchild of CERN physicist Christoph Rembser, who also coordinated the project. He and others at CERN didn’t originally plan for more than one team to win. But it made sense, as the two groups easily merged their experiments: Dominicus College students constructed a calorimeter that was placed within the Varvakios Pilot School’s experiment, which studied one of the four fundamental forces, the weak force.
“These two strong experiments fit so well together, and having an international collaboration, just like what we have at CERN, was great,” says Kristin Kaltenhauser of CERN’s international relations office, who worked with the students.
Over the summer the Nijmegen team grew crystals from potassium dihydrogen phosphate, a technique not used before at CERN, to make their own calorimeter, a piece of equipment that measures the energy of different particles.
At CERN, the unified team cross-calibrated the Nijmegen calorimeter with a calorimeter at CERN.
“We were worried if it would work,” says Nijmegen teacher Rachel Crane. “But then we tested our calorimeter on the beam with a lot of particles—positrons, electrons, pions and muons—and we really saw the difference. That was really amazing.”
The Athens team modeled their proposal on one of CERN’s iconic early experiments, conducted at the laboratory's first accelerator in 1958 to study an aspect of the weak force, which powers the thermonuclear reactions that cause the sun to shine.
Whereas the 1958 experiment had used a beam made completely of particles called pions, the students’ experiment used a higher energy beam containing a mixture of pions, kaons, protons, electrons and muons. They are currently analyzing the data.
CERN physicists Saime Gurbuz and Cenk Yildiz, who assisted the two teams, say they and other CERN scientists were very impressed with the students. “They were like real physicists,” Gurbuz says. “They were professional and eager to take data and analyze it.”
The students and their teachers agree that working together enriched both their science and their overall experience. “We were one team,” says Athens student Nikolas Plaskovitis. “The collaboration was great and added so much to the experiment.”
The students, teachers and CERN scientists have stayed in touch since the trip.
Before Nijmegen student Olaf Leender started working on the proposal, he was already interested in science, he says. “Now after my visit to CERN and this awesome experience, I am definitely going to study physics.”
Andreas Valadakis, who teaches the Athens group, says that his students now serve as science mentors to their fellow students. “This experience was beyond what we imagined,” he says.
Plaskovitis agrees with his teacher. “When we ran the beam line at CERN, just a few meters away behind the wall was the weak force at work. Just like the sun. And we were right there next to it.”
Kaltenhauser says that CERN plans to hold another Beam Line for Schools competition in the future.