Thanks to five successful editions, the Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition that offers highschool students the chance to conduct a real experiment at a real research laboratory has become a very popular science competition that has so far motivated almost 10,000 students to learn about particle physics.
In 2019, the accelerators at CERN are going into a scheduled maintenance and upgrade break of two years. In order to continue BL4S, CERN is collaborating with DESY in Hamburg, Germany. DESY is a world-leading accelerator centre and Germany's national laboratory for particle physics, accelerators and photon science. It offers particle beams and infrastructure that allow for a very wide range of experiments in particle physics, detector development, and multidisciplinary science.
The Beamline for Schools competition remains open to teams of at least five high school students aged 16 and up with at least one adult supervisor, or “coach”. Think of a simple, creative experiment and submit your written proposal and short video by 31 March 2019. Previous winners have investigated the structure of the pyramids, looked for particles that no-one has seen before, or have developed their own particle detector. What would you do?
- July 2018 – Registration Opening Register your team name, country, and coach’s contact details to start receiving email updates.
- 31 March 2019 – Submission Deadline Submit your 1000-word proposal and 1-minute video (both in English only) by midnight CET.
- June 2019 – Winners Announcement CERN and DESY announce the winners, who will be invited to DESY, as well as 20 to 30 short-listed teams.
- September/October 2019 – Winners conduct their experiment at DESY Exact dates will be defined by DESY's accelerator schedule.
Prizes: All participants receive a certificate. Short-listed teams win a BL4S T-shirt for each team member, a cosmic-ray detector (CosmicPi) for the school, and – for some – the chance to visit a nearby physics laboratory. For the winning teams, nine members and up to two adult coaches
Registration: http://cern.ch/bl4s
Any other questions? For many countries, experienced scientists have offered to help the teams in their native language:
https://cern.ch/bl4s/contact
In case your country or language is not listed or if you have general comments, suggestions, or organisational questions, please contact us directly at bl4s.team@cern.ch.
