Year 12 and Year 13 A level Physics students had the opportunity to spend the weekend of 27–29 March at CERN, Geneva in Switzerland, exploring the world of particle physics. The tour began with a visit to the the Globe of Science and Innovation, a unique visual landmark by day and by night. The Globe of Science and Innovation is a symbol of the Planet Earth. It is CERN’s new outreach tool for its work in the fields of science, particle physics, leading-edge technologies and their applications in everyday life.

Inside the Globe was the Universe of Particles, an exhibition that took the students on a journey deep into the world of particles and back to the Big Bang by immersing them in a unique and spectacular ambiance. Students learnt that the entire Universe is made up of particles. But where do they come from? What laws govern their behaviour? The purpose of the “Universe of Particles” exhibition is for visitors to confront the great questions of contemporary physics, currently being explored by the CERN via the LHC and other accelerators.

They also had a chance to visit the “Microcosm” exhibition at CERN through multimedia exhibits, machines, games and experiments. They discovered the amazing “CERN adventure”, from the infinitely large to the infinitesimally small. Microcosm gave pupils the key to understanding the secrets of matter. In this exhibition they explored the mysteries of the universe and discovered the massive apparatus used by physicists, the accelerators and detectors, and saw how each part works!

This was then followed by a talk given by CERN research staff lasting three hours. We went across the border into France to visit an experimental area, the AMS Payload Operations Control Centre (POCC) working on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02). This is a particle-physics detector that looks for dark matter, antimatter and missing matter from a module attached to the outside of the International Space Station (ISS). It also performs precision measurements of cosmic rays.  The AMS detector was assembled at CERN and sent into space in 2011.  In one year 17 billion cosmic-ray events are detected and data is received by NASA in Houston and then relayed to the AMS Payload Operations Control Centre at CERN for analysis.

After the tour of the AMS we were fortunate to have the opportunity to see the accelerator complex at CERN.  This is a succession of machines that accelerate particles to increasingly higher energies. Each machine boosts the energy of a beam of particles, before injecting the beam into the next machine in the sequence. In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the last element in this chain – particle beams are accelerated up to the record energy of 4 TeV per beam. The two beams are brought into collision inside four detectors – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. During March 2014 the detectors were undergoing scheduled maintenance and Queenswood students were taken 100m below ground level to visit the CMS detector one of the largest experiments at CERN. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the LHC. It is designed to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter. The CMS experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving 4300 particle physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff from 182 institutes in 42 countries.