An MIT graduate student helped a team of young scientists test their experiment at CERN

Last spring, MIT physics graduate student Manu Srivastava got an email from six high school students in India he’d never met. They were entering Beamline for Schools — an international competition that lets secondary students run experiments on particle accelerator beams — and needed a mentor. He usually declines such requests, which typically arrive through companies charging families for access to scientists. This one came straight from the students, so he said yes. Team attoPION was one of five teams chosen from a record 712 entries across 89 countries.

They settled on measuring pion charge exchange: a positive pion hits a neutron and produces a neutral pion and a proton. It matters to DUNE, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, because pion interactions feed into estimates of a neutrino’s flavor and energy. DUNE co-spokesperson Dave Newbold calls it real experimental particle physics, not a classroom demonstration, and rates it far above anything he considered in high school.

At CERN the team spent two weeks on detectors and data acquisition. Preparation revealed the reaction is extremely rare, forcing hard thinking about detecting it at all with just 12 days of beam time. Support scientist Berare Göktürk was candid that a DUNE-useful result would be ambitious — her priority is that the students understand the journey of a scientist. Srivastava, a theorist who grew up in India, didn’t know what CERN was in high school. These students, he says, are just that good.

Read the full story – MIT News. Competition results – CERN.

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