The CERN “beam line for schools” competition offers high-school students the chance to conduct a real experiment using a CERN proton beam.
CERN will be making a fully equipped beam line available for a team of school students to run an experiment
CERN is famous for the Large Hadron Collider, but there’s much more to the laboratory than that. A large part of CERN’s research and development is carried out using fixed-target beam lines, which are used for a variety of experiments that range from investigating the inner workings of protons to probing the mysteries of antimatter. In 2014, to coincide with its 60th anniversary, CERN will be making a fully equipped beam line available for a team of school students to run an experiment. Physicists, engineers and experts in data acquisition and analysis will offer students guidance. Beam time will be allocated by scientific competition, just as it is allocated for all CERN experiments.
The competition is open to teams of high-school students aged 16 and up. Teams can be composed of up to 30 students with at least one adult supervisor, or "coach". Up to nine of the team members and two coaches would come to CERN to run the team's experiments. Proposals will be pre-selected by a committee of CERN scientists, and the shortlist will be sent to the SPSC, the committee that validates all proposals for experiments at the laboratory’s SPS and PS accelerators.
To enter, student teams should carefully study the information about the beam line and experimental facilities (available for download below) and tell us why they think they should win the chance to carry out experiments at the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics.
Proposals will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
Motivation of the students
Creativity
Feasibility of the proposal
Demonstration of ability to follow the scientific method
How to take part
There is stiff competition for access to the laboratory's unique facilities; all CERN experiments must be approved by a scientific committee. A successful application process by a collaboration wishing to run an experiment at CERN tends to follow this pattern:
The collaboration submits a letter of intent to the committee.
The committee invites the collaboration to submit a full proposal.
The collaboration submits a full proposal.
If the collaboration's experiment is accepted, it is integrated to the laboratory's research programme.
The beam line for schools will follow the same pattern:
Teams register (their expression of intent) - deadline: 31 January 2014
Teams submit a full proposal - deadline: 31 March 2014
All proposals are considered by a team of CERN scientists, and a shortlist prepared for the SPSC - key factors at this stage are motivation and creativity
The SPSC considers the shortlisted teams and selects one - May 2014
Nine members of the winning team, plus up to two adult coaches, come to CERN to carry out their experiment - between July and September 2014
Find out more
