Two teams of high-school students, one from the Praedinius Gymnasium in Groningen, Netherlands (pictured), and one from the West High School in Salt Lake City, US, have won CERN’s 2019 Beamline for Schools competition. In October, the teams will travel to DESY in Germany to carry out their proposed experiments together with scientists from CERN and DESY. The Netherlands team “Particle Peers” will compare the properties of the particle showers originating from electrons with those created from positrons, while the “DESY Chain” team from the US will focus on the properties of scintillators for more efficient particle detectors. Since Beamline for Schools was launched in 2014, almost 10,000 students from 84 countries have participated. This year, 178 teams from 49 countries worldwide submitted a proposal for the sixth edition of the competition. Due to the current long shutdown of CERN’s accelerators for maintenance and upgrade, there is currently no beam at CERN, which has opened up opportunities to explore partnerships with DESY and other laboratories.
