Trip to CERN

In February, City's Physics students joined forces with the Physics Department at City of London School (CLS) and invaded Switzerland to learn more about particle accelerators at CERN, the home of the world’s largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

"The LHC, which will be switched on later this year, will accelerate Hardrons (particles made up of quarks) close to the speed of light before colliding them head on with other Hadrons. The Physicists at CERN hope to generate temperatures 100 000 times hotter than the core of the Sun, last seen when the Universe was only a few millionths of a second old. This in turn will hopefully produce evidence of the Higgs Boson (nicknamed the God Particle) and explain why particles have mass. It will also see a huge step in unifying the electromagnetic, the strong nuclear and the weak nuclear forces and perhaps help to explain why the gravitational force is weakest of the four forces.

We started our first full day at CERN looking around the microcosm exhibition.

Students broke into small research groups and focused on various subjects including Rutherford’s model of the atom and an eight-foot spark chamber showing the path of cosmic radiation. The exhibits were incredibly fascinating and were interesting enough to keep everyone engrossed for over two hours.

After a quick lunch and an introductory talk we split into two groups and toured the main sites of CERN, including the huge server and data storage rooms. The largest part of the tour involved an elevator trip 100m down, where we were to introduced to ATLAS, one of the massive particle detectors placed along the 27 km accelerator. It was too massive to appreciate and unfortunately, as it had just been put together, ready for the switch on, we could only see the colossal shell of this impressive piece of equipment.

On the second full day we were lucky enough to be taken on a very personal and informal “back stage” tour of CERN. This proved to be the unexpected gem of the trip. Nobel Prize winning Physicists popped out of offices, showed us their particle accelerators and answered questions fired at them from excited students. We were very lucky to have a personal tour of LEIR, a ring accelerator, and LINAC II, a linear accelerator that accelerates protons.

In the evening the City students got together in their groups and presented their findings to everyone. This took place in an impressive looking building, with the uninspired name of building number 40. How many people can say that they gave a presentation on Particle Physics at CERN? One for the scrapbook for all concerned."

Mr M Wilkinson, Head of Physics