Five Indian school students advance to CERN competition
Five Indian school students have qualified as winners of the 13th edition of the 'Beamline for Schools' competition, a physics competition for high school students organized by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva. The Indian team, named "attoPION", comprises Nenavath Abhay Vivek, Sidhartha Aniket Jaiswal, Ayush Bhardwaj, Aarush Mandala, and Aritra Sadhukhan, hailing from Bansal Junior College Nizamabad, Greenwood High International School Bengaluru, The Shri Ram Global School Greater Noida, and Purv International School Durgapur. They found each other through various science competitions they participated in.
The students invested significant time in preparation, spending several hours daily over three to four weeks leading up to the competition. While the first week was devoted to team formation and recruitment, the subsequent three weeks involved intensive study and problem-solving. The Indian team's project focused on pion charge exchange, examining how often a charged pion transforms into a neutral one when striking light atoms like lithium and beryllium at specific energy levels. These measurements are relevant for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a large physics experiment under construction in the U.S., as pion charge changes can affect data accuracy in neutrino research.
The team was among five winning teams selected from the competition, with other winners coming from Bangladesh, Türkiye, the U.K., and the U.S. A beamline is a facility that provides high-energy fluxes of subatomic particles used for experiments in fundamental physics, material science, and medicine.
