{"id":16476,"date":"2019-06-25T05:09:50","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T05:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=16476"},"modified":"2020-06-09T12:43:14","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T12:43:14","slug":"dutch-and-us-students-win-2019-cern-beamline-for-schools-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/dutch-and-us-students-win-2019-cern-beamline-for-schools-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"Dutch and US students win 2019 CERN Beamline for Schools competition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Two teams of high-school students, one from the\u00a0Praedinius Gymnasium<\/a>\u00a0in Groningen, Netherlands, and one from the\u00a0West High School<\/a>\u00a0in Salt Lake City, USA, have won\u00a0the 2019\u00a0Beamline for Schools competition<\/a>\u00a0(BL4S).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0In October, these teams will be invited to the\u00a0DESY<\/a>1\u00a0<\/sup>research centre in Hamburg, Germany, to carry out their proposed experiments together with scientists from CERN and DESY.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beamline for Schools is a unique international competition that is open to high-school students all over the world. The students are invited to submit a proposal for an experiment that uses a beamline. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beamlines deliver a stream of subatomic particles to any given set-up, making it possible to study a broad variety of properties and processes in various scientific disciplines. They are operated at laboratories such as CERN and DESY.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Due to the second Long Shutdown of CERN\u2019s accelerators for maintenance and upgrade, there is currently no beam at CERN, which has opened up opportunities to explore partnerships with other laboratories, namely DESY.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is a great honour for us to host the finals of this year\u2019s Beamline for Schools competition at DESY,\u201d said Helmut Dosch, Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors. \u201cWe are really looking forward to meeting the extraordinary students who made it through with their proposals and we wish them a successful and rewarding time at the lab. We at DESY are committed to fostering the next generation of scientists, which CERN\u2019s Beamline for Schools project does brilliantly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u201cWe are all very excited to welcome this year\u2019s winners to DESY. This is a new chapter in the history of this competition because, for the first time, we are taking the finals of the competition to another research laboratory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, the more then 60\u00a0voluntary experts from CERN and DESY evaluated all the proposals for their creativity, motivation, proposed methodology, feasibility and\u00a0their overall ability to explore some of the concepts of modern particle physics\u201d\u00a0said Sarah Aretz, BL4S project manager.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two winning teams of 2019 will look at fundamental differences between matter and antimatter. When electrons at high energies collide with a target, such as a piece of graphite, some of their energy gets transferred into photons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These photons can, in turn, transform into other particles. Eventually, a shower of particles at lower energy will develop. The team \u201cParticle Peers\u201d from the Praedinius Gymnasium, Groningen, Netherlands has proposed to compare the properties of the particle showers originating from electrons with those created from positrons, the antimatter partner of the electron.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“\u200bI couldn’t stop smiling when I heard the news that we\u2019d won. It’s unbelievable\u00a0that we\u2019ll get the opportunity to conduct our experiment with amazing scientists and meet new students who are just as enthusiastic about physics as I am,” said Frederiek de Bruine from the \u201cParticle Peers\u201d team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cDESY Chain\u201d team from the West High School, Salt Lake City, USA, focuses on the properties of scintillators in its proposal. These are materials that are used for particle detection. The students aim to study the performance of these scintillators and compare their sensitivity to electrons and positrons. This may lead to more efficient particle detectors for a wide range of applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students aim to study the performance of these scintillators and compare their sensitivity to electrons and positrons. This may lead to more efficient particle detectors for a wide range of applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m so excited by the prospect of working at DESY this autumn, it\u2019s such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I\u2019m proud to be a part of the first USA team to win the BL4S competition, especially because it provides access to equipment and systems I would otherwise never have dreamt of even seeing,\u201d said August Muller from the \u201cDESY Chain\u201d team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The shortlist consisted of 20 teams, ten of which received a special mention.\u00a0This is the second time that a Dutch team has won the competition. Previous winners came from schools in the Netherlands, Greece, Italy (twice), South Africa, Poland, the United Kingdom, Canada, India and the Philippines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beamline for Schools is an\u00a0Education and Outreach project<\/a>\u00a0funded by the CERN & Society Foundation and supported by individual donors, foundations and companies. For 2019, the project is partially funded by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation; additional contributions have been received from the Motorola Solutions Foundation, Amgen Switzerland AG and the Ernest Solvay Fund, which is managed by the King Baudouin Foundation.<\/p>\n
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Two teams of high-school students, one from the Praedinius Gymnasium in Groningen, Netherlands, and one from the West High School in Salt Lake City, USA, have won the 2019 Beamline for Schools competition (BL4S).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16477,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",2000,860,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern-200x200.jpg",200,200,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern-300x129.jpg",300,129,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern-768x330.jpg",750,322,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern-1024x440.jpg",750,322,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",1536,660,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",2000,860,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",1200,516,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",870,374,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",600,258,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",600,258,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",760,327,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",550,237,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",95,41,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",640,275,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",96,41,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/us_cern.jpg",150,65,false]},"author_info":{"info":["RevoScience"]},"category_info":"News<\/a>","tag_info":"News","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}