Live from CERN - School kids running their own experiment at CERN
What about high-school students running an experiment at CERN? Is this a crazy idea? Maybe. But it is actually happening every year since 2014.
For my 10th post on what is going on at CERN (yep, this is already the 10th post of that series), I will focus on a topic slightly different from wha I am usually covering. I will discuss a competition for high-school kids organized by CERN and whose winners…. get the chance to perform a scientific experiments at CERN.
THE BEAMLINE FOR SCHOOL COMPETITION
[image credit: CERN]
The beamline for schools competition is a yearly contest organized for 5 years by CERN.
The idea is to offer a chance to high-school kids from all over the world to design their own scientific experiment, and to run it at CERN (the largest physics laboratory in the world), using beams of accelerated particles.
They have to design an experimental setup around one of the CERN's beamline, that can then be used together with devices totally ready for experimentation. This means that detectors are there, a target is there (the beam is smashed against a target) and if this is not sufficient, each team is in addition allowed to bring its own detector there!
Of course, there is no LHC this time. There will thus be no way to search for supersymmetry or a Higgs boson :)
Groups of students from all over the world are submitting proposals, and the two best proposals are selected. The winning participants are then invited to CERN to work together and run the experiment described in their proposal.
This experiment will actually be run in exactly the same conditions that researchers from all over the world run their own experiments!
WHO AND HOW?
The competition is open to teams made of at least 5 high-school students that are aged from 15 years old to 19 years old (and that are not enrolled in any university program, this is really for kids), together with one (adult) coach.
[image credit: CERN]
Each participating team must submit a written proposal detailing what they are planning to do, as well as a one-minute-long video explaining why the want to go to CERN. And of course, as on Steemit, copyrights must be respected and plagiarism is not allowed!
The referees judge creativity and feasibility, of course, but also the motivation and how the scientific method is used.
To give some examples about concrete projects that have been selected, the 2016 winners have proposed to test Einstein’s special relativity with particles called pions, and some of the muon properties with tomography.
Would educators on Steemit be interested? I do not know the answer (but please let me know!). In any case, there is still time: the deadline for the 2018 edition is known and is the 31st of March (of next year).
@giantbear: what about taking part to the competition next year, with your students?
THE 2017 EDITION IN A NUTSHELL
[image credit: CERN]
This year, 180 proposals have been submitted, from 43 different countries (you can check the map on the left). A large fraction of the entire world was hence there (or at least all the five continents) and 33% of girls (for those interested by gender parity).
This consists of a total of about 1500 high-school students, who each spends sometimes more than hundred of hours on the design of their project. The projects have been evaluated by a panel of 40 experts who have then submitted a shortlist to another committee. The latter decided about the deserving winners.
As expected, the two winner teams will go to CERN next September in order to run their experiment. The names of the two experiments that have been selected this year are Charging Cavaliers and TCO-ASA. Probably better names than the average names found by scientists :)
THE 2017 WINNERS
The two projects that won the competition this year are named, as said above, Charging Cavaliers (Canada) and TCO-ASA (Italy). They involve teams of respectively 13 and 8 students, and focus on elementary particles (not all the particles that are used at CERN are elementary).
The Canadian project aims to look for a new type of particles with a fractional electric charge by means of probing the light that is emitted when they pass through a liquid scintillator. I recall that scintillators are material that, when they are hit by a given particle, absorbs its energy and re-emit it under the form of light. The idea is to compare measurements to light emitted by known charged particles.
The Italian team has instead built its own low-cost Cherenkov detector (I discussed Cherenkov radiation in this post on dark matter, HAWC and the dwarf galaxies) in order to observe elementary particles moving faster than light. In other words, they want to show that physics can be studied in a cheap way, at least sometimes!
And I emphasize it: those projects have been created by high-school students!
TAKE-HOME MESSAGE AND REFERENCES
In this article, I described a very nice competition organized by CERN, whose goal is to allow high-school students to run a real particle physics experiment at CERN. This contest runs for already 5 years, and it gets an amazing success so far (when accounting for the number of applicants).
In short, this is never too early to become an experimenter (as well as a theorist by the way).
Very cool idea. STEM is always in need of some fresh blood. :-)
Yep! The earliest the best :)
Wow! That's awesome! Great initiative to encourage kids as now a days, kids are going away from studying science.
It is indeed very hard to attract people to science today, for many reason. While many are not against science in general, they don't want to have a job in science. At least in fundamental physics, which is what I know.
I like LHC/Cern, for a long time I ran ATLAS@Home and LHC Sixtrack on my computers under the BOINC project.
Followed and resteemed
Thank you! It is amazing to see the entire world sharing its computing power for science :)
This sounds so cool. Let me share with the kids on Monday and then I will get back to you for some guidance. Thanks for this!
My pleasure! I hope you will get interested! :)
Nice post my friend! Following!
Thank you!
CERN is not the public face they put on. The CERN-LHC had International Sovereignty just like the Vatican City - Holy See, City of London Corporation, United States District of Columbia Municipal Corporation, and the United Nations.
They have publicly stated that they are seeking to open dimensional doorways, and possibly to "hell" as some would consider "negative vibratory consciousness."
They have Dancing Shiva -the Indian God of Destruction- as the entrance statute and they even conduct satanic rituals with the statue. The "scientists" seem to be very religious! and are trying to pass it off as a prank. How many times have they done it without getting caught? What other rituals are they doing? Nearly every ceremony at CERN is some kind of "SACRIFICE" and an occult ritual. These evidences are not unrelated.
CERN has been granted Diplomatic Sovereignty because they seem to be engaging in some very questionable science. The NSA in an article entitled: NSA Concerned: CERN’s Data the Only Ones They Cannot Make Sense Of, from February 4, 2014, provides:
It is hypothesized that the Mandela Effects are due to changing the weight of a single electron at CERN - LHC. That shifted the dimensional holograph affecting "History."
Here is the crux of the issue: CERN has decided to build a new SUPER Super Collider called the Future Circular Collider that is 4x more powerful than the LHC. Given the non-linear Lorenz equations, the FCC may cause exponential mandela effects
Lastly, This is not about Anti-science. This is about reasonable science without satanic occult non-sense.
Your answer is just full of non-sense and wrong facts... I could refute any single word in there with facts and proofs, but you could equally use google it and find the answer by yourself. So please do the exercise :)
Exactly. Did you view any of the links provided in the post? It seems someone needs to use google to vet their facts via Kruger-Dunning Effect. lol. :-) The links in blue are sources.
Where are your sources backing up your claims? Because I am just reporting what CERN has said about their own machine. Reporting what they say and are doing is not "non-sense."
Making claims that clearly sourced articles are not sourced, "non-sense, and wrong facts" without backing up your own words is the most comical psychological projection i've seen in a while. thank you.
If you could refute any single word, why did you not use google to disprove that CERN themselves discuss opening dimensional gateways to alternate universes and possibly very negative-polarized dimensions (considered by some to be "hell").
FYI. I just used Google to find The Register: 'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC
I work there. I work with them. I know what I am doing. We all know what we are doing. Taken the literature on the topic. All links you pointed are non sense.
Now, I cannot answer. I must go and sacrifice my 45 virgins to Satan...