A group of students from West High School will travel to Europe this fall to work with CERN, the international particle physics laboratory. Their teacher, Enrique Arce-Larreta says they’ll be testing a particle detector with electrons traveling near the speed of light.
The question they hope to answer? “What is the thickness this plastic detector has to be to most effectively measure particles traveling through it?” Arce-Larretta told KSL Newsradio. “And they’re going to be firing both matter and anti-matter at the detector.”
Arce-Larreta says the eight students from West will be working closely with students from another high school in the Netherlands. “We are going to be sharing the space with the Dutch team. Because of that, we have to know their experiment really well because we will be collecting their data and they will also be collecting our data.”
The two schools finished first among 178 teams from 18 countries in the Beamline for Schools competition.