A-Level Physics trip to CERN, Switzerland
One of the opportunities offered to us as a school in France is the relative ease with which we can travel to Geneva to visit CERN, the “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire”. CERN was originally built on a patch of farmland in Meyrin a mere stone’s throw from Geneva.
CERN was originally founded by 12 countries, but now has 23 full member states (as well as many other contributors from around the world). CERN is a powerful example of what international collaboration can accomplish. Modern life owes CERN a great deal, not only because of its contribution to the body of scientific knowledge but also the unintended benefits of the technologies that are developed there.
We arrived in Geneva on Wednesday afternoon, the day before the visit, as we had organised a full day of activities at CERN.
Our tour of CERN began at 9.00am on Thursday morning with an exhibition at the original particle accelerator built in 1957, the “Synchro-cyclotron”, which helped prove the existence of the positron and the muon. We were also taught about the subsequent accelerators built in CERN, up to the current largest model, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Originally particles would be accelerated to 80% of the speed of light, now they reach a whopping 99.9999%. All of this as the energies increased from 0.6 GeV to 14 TeV.
The second stop was the data centre at the Meyrin site. Many people are unaware of the deluge of data that is generated performing high energy physics experiments. In fact you may be surprised to hear that the internet was created by Tim Berners Lee at CERN to deal with this deluge.
The third part of the morning tour was a visit to the “Antimatter Factory” which features in Dan Brown’s book “Angels and Demons”. In this facility anti-hydrogen is created by combining anti-protons and positrons and then used to determine whether it behaves in the same way as hydrogen. An amusing experiment is that they drop a single atom of anti-hydrogen in a vacuum to see if it accelerates at g, much like the free fall experiments we do with Year 12 by dropping ball bearings.
Following a tasty lunch at the cafeteria we headed to a laboratory to build cloud chambers. This activity was expertly headed by a resident physicist and punctuated by ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ from our students. Our Year 12s and 13s impressed by demonstrating their knowledge of particles and Feynman diagrams.
Before we knew it, the day drew thin and we had to head back to Paris. Our students were tired but their brains were filled with a once in a lifetime experience.
