Thanks to five successful editions, the Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition that offers high-school 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. Find out more about DESY's beam line and facilities at http://cern.ch/bl4s.
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 per team will be invited, all expenses paid, to DESY for 10-12 days to carry out the experiments.
Register now at http://cern.ch/bl4s!
Any other questions? For many countries, experienced scientists have offered to help the teams in their native language (see here: 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.