Torquay students hunt for the Higgs boson at CERN

Students from TGGS have been inspired by a visit to CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider.  

During the visit on 8^th December 2023, the students discovered how CERN is helping to answer some of the most fundamental questions; how did the Universe begin? What are the basic building blocks of matter?  

Scientific breakthroughs such as the discovery of the Higgs boson require experimental machines on the large scale, and the students gained an appreciation of the technical and engineering challenges that the multinational experimental collaborations at CERN face. 

Mr J Castillo, head of Physics at TGGS, said, ‘I would recommend the visit to anyone having an interest on physics in general. It was a very interesting and informative tour which links very well with our Physics teaching at A level. Our students were able to visit not only the control room site at CERN and the ALICE detector site but also the new exhibits buildings with interactive scientific demonstrations to gain a much better understanding of what happens in this cornerstone of modern science. In fact, as a result of this visit some of our students dream about the possibility to work at CERN in the future’.  

The UK has been a member of CERN since the organisation was founded in 1954.  Membership allows British researchers to take a wide variety of roles that contribute to CERN’s on-going success; from recently qualified technicians and university undergraduates gaining their first taste of working in an international environment to PhD students analysing experimental data and experienced engineers and physicists leading projects or representing their experimental collaborations.  The TGGS students’ visit was led by a member of the CERN community who talked from personal experience about their contribution to CERN’s research programme. 

STFC’s Executive Chair, Professor Mark Thomson, said “The scale of the science and technology at CERN is awe-inspiring.  There is no doubt that seeing it at first hand, and meeting the people who work on the experiments, can influence young people’s future education and career choices.”