During early 2022, a friend of mine approached me to work on the CERN Beamline project. I had long thought about participating in the competition but I didn’t had a team. So, when the opportunity presented itself we discussed about it and formed a team of 5 people from Nepal and India. But we were clueless, although we studied Physics, we hadn’t reached in depth of many key concepts.

For the CERN Beamline Project, student groups have to submit a proposal to see their experiment run in the CERN’s particle accelerator with an added benefit of being invited to a all paid tour to Geneva, Switzerland. So, we started brainstorming on the problem statement and landed on working in the quantum physics field especially studying the particles in the standard model.

With now our project area identified, one might think we started ideating our experiment but we actually started studying the standard model particles and their behavior. We had a basic understanding of it but that wasn’t enough for us to move ahead. Everyone in our team got enrolled in a quantum physics course with a core specific to the standard model from Coursera (Thanks Coursera ;)). We completed the 3 weeks-long course in just 3 days. That’s an impressive achievement in itself.

With that done, we were now sufficiently equipped with enough knowledge to work towards designing an actual experiment to propose to CERN (We were feeling as if we were a working physicist at CERN itself). We chose to design our experiment around Muons because of its interesting property to disintegrate very quickly into electrons which makes it hard for scientists to measure them. So we proposed an alternative approach to measuring the muons in a state where the disintegration time is less and makes it easy to measure it. We called it Special Muons (gotta name these who knows the new generation could be reading it).

We then designed the experiment around the different equipment CERN had to offer and submitted it for judging. This was around my board exams (probably should have focused more on studies).

3 weeks later the results were announced but unfortunately, we weren’t in the top 10 but received a certificate of participation. Although we couldn’t win, the experience was so surreal that it made up for the loss. From assembling a cross-country team to studying about standard model in just 3 days and designing an experiment based on it was the most fun thing I ever done and it makes me proud.

Key Takeaways:

• If dedicated towards a work with full passion, no matter how hard it is, I can achieve it.
• Doing things at the last moment is probably not a good idea.
• Stay in touch with the team members even after the end of the competition.