AIDA-2020 technology in high school
Barbara Warmbein, 28/11/2019
The two winning teams from the 2019 Beamline for Schools competition – DESY Chain from Salt Lake City, Utah, USA and Particle Peers from Groningen, Netherlands – work on their projects at DESY Hamburg. (Image: DESY)
Every year high-school students from around the world have the chance to become scientists for two weeks and do real experiments at a real beamline. The CERN Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition started in 2014; by its sixth edition this year, more than 10,000 students from 84 countries have submitted experiment proposals to win beamtime. Normally teams set up their experiments at CERN, but due to the shutdown of CERN’s accelerator chain, this year’s finals were moved to the research centre DESY in Hamburg, Germany. Here, the teams took advantage of the existing test beam infrastructure and used one of the AIDA-2020 beam telescopes as well as electronics and data analysis for their experiments.
This year’s winning teams came from Salt Lake City, Utah, in the USA, and Groningen in the Netherlands. The two teams lived on site in the hostel, had a series of safety and software trainings, visits, talks, spontaneous night shifts, and even a VIP visit and a concert. They collaborated closely during their experiment runs, sharing materials and data-processing techniques. Both teams presented their results in DESY’s main auditorium on their last day and aim to publish them in scientific journals results.
The US team (called “DESY Chain”) experimented with scintillator sensitivity using electrons and positrons. The Dutch team “Particle Peers” investigated differences in particle showers between matter and antimatter. “We didn’t expect to have such big datasets, or so many different datasets,” said Isabelle Koster from Particle Peers. “That was a real bonus. We did everything we wanted to do. And we made so many friends along the way!”
The two Beamline for Schools winning teams were selected from 178 entries and the organisers are hoping for an even stronger showing for next year. The next edition will also be held at DESY, using test beam infrastructure developed under the AIDA projects.