The winning teams of the Beamline for Schools competition in the HERA tunnel. (Photo: Marta Mayer / DESY)
From Mexico City and Montreal to Hamburg! This year we have two winning teams of the international Beamline for Schools competition doing experiments at the DESY test beam in Hamburg. The teams of pupils from Mexico and Canada are performing the award-winning experiments that they themselves designed. DESY cooperates with CERN to give high school students around the world to do such research. This year 508 teams competed for the top prize of performing their experiments at either DESY in Hamburg, CERN in Geneva, or ELSA in Bonn. This is the seventh year that DESY hosts winning teams.
The Mexican team, Pumas in Kollision from Mexico City, is analysing unconventional potential scintillators for the purpose of building less expensive detectors. The team will be using the extract from a tree local to Mexico that is commonly used as a diuretic tea. Kidneywood pigment, as the extract is known, glows when excited by bright light, particularly when it is mixed with the organic solvent toluene. The team also tested the mineral fluorite for its scintillating capabilities.
“The team at DESY provided special containers that we can use to test the liquid pigment in the electron beam,” says Haziel Barcenas, a member of Pumas in Kollision.
Paula Gonzalez, another member of the Pumas in Kollision, described how the transition from student to scientist in the competition quickly developed. “It’s a very demanding experience here – it makes you increase in every level of science, whether it’s coding, or maths, or chemistry. But we have all of the resources we need to perform this experiment, and I’m amazed at the creative liberty. This lets us have a full imagination on how to solve problems.”
Teacher Laura Gonzalez, who now has successfully brought two winning teams to DESY to perform experiments, concurs on the freedom the students have. “The kids manage very well in the laboratory,” she says. “They are eager to participate in forming new ideas. They propose many things and try to learn. We are very motivated with this team!”
The Canadian team, Dawson Technicolor from Montreal in Canada, is testing a homemade cosmic ray detector. They conceptualized and built from scratch using spare parts a scintillating detector that they tested with electrons at the DESY test beam as their experiment. The electrons mimic the trajectories of the cosmic ray constituent particle muons with a three-dimensional detector that can change its orientation.
“We built the detector using polyvinyl toluene rods, arranging them so that we can develop exponential precision across the detector using as few rods as possible,” says Aljoscha Ziegler of Dawson Technicolor.
The team also developed their own data acquisition architecture and data visualizer from the ground up over the course of eight months. “It’s been an awesome experience to work with friends over the summer on coding this system,” says Evan Parasol from Dawson Technicolor. “We could learn new things from each other and exercise the things we already individually could do well.” His teammate Chun-On Yu marveled at the experience of coming to a lab like DESY: “I get to see machinery here that we just don’t get to see back home in our school!”
Until 24 September, the teams will perform their experiments and be able to tour science facilities around Hamburg. At the end of their stay, they will present their preliminary results.
DESY Director Beate Heinemann says: “We hope that the school teams from Mexico and Canada have had fulfilling, memorable, and enriching experiences! We are particularly pleased to be able to strengthen transatlantic cooperation and contribute to this competition in collaboration with CERN.”
Beamline for Schools is an education and outreach project funded by the CERN & Society Foundation’s donors. This 12th edition is supported notably by ROLEX through its Perpetual Planet Initiative and by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation.
