PARTICLE PHYSICS

There’s a new winning team in town for Beamline for Schools: The Wire Wizards, who despite their magical name, have some great science to do. They’ve built their own detectors at their school, the Augustinianum in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, which they will now characterise and optimise using the DESY test beam for the next two weeks. The Beamline for Schools competition, which is organised by the European particle physics laboratory CERN in Switzerland, enables secondary school pupils to design experiments that use a particle beam, and the winners can carry out those experiments at CERN and DESY. Two other winning teams, from Pakistan and the USA, are doing their experiments at CERN.

“We are happy to be here and looking forward to do our experiments and learn new things, says Tijmen de Graaf from the Wire Wizards. Sela Hoeijmans adds: “It´s amazing and huge here at DESY – you can already see it on the map that we´ve got. I can´t really believe that we are actually here.”

The Wire Wizards have developed a multi-wire proportional chamber (MWPC), a type of particle detector. The MWPC is hermetically sealed and contains a gas that can be ionised by energetic particles. When this ionisation happens, the free electrons in the gas are collected by a wire, and their charge is turned into an electrical signal. By using several such chambers in a variety of orientations, the trail of scattering particles can be followed.

“We are proud of our efforts – a lot of work went into it –, and we feel proud to be here and see how the physicists work here”, says Leon Verreijt, the initiator of the team´s application and constructor of the wire chambers to be tested. Being impressed by the detectors at a vacational visit at CERN, he decided: “I need to build one myself.” He started it within a school project and has invested much time and money into his prototypes in the meantime. “A lot of newspaper deliveries went in it in the meantime,” he smiles.

Now, the moment of truth is approaching: Will the wire chambers work as hoped for? Within the next two weeks, the team can test them at the core. After a series of instructions and safety trainings, they will perform their experiments at the DESY test beam, which comprises a set of experiment hutches using the beam from the historic DESY accelerator at the heart of the Hamburg campus.

Beamline for Schools is now in its 10th year. Originally the competition was created to give pupils the chance to do experiments at CERN, but following the long shutdown of the CERN accelerators from 2019 to 2021, DESY hosted the competition winners instead. Since CERN’s accelerators came back online, DESY has continued hosting one of the three winners each year. The competition is supported this year by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation, ROLEX through its Perpetual Planet Initiative, and the CERN & Society Foundation.

Further Information
Beamline for Schools-Website