Particle Physics Masterclass at the Rutherford Laboratory

A view from above the beam pipe at the Diamond Light Source. This shows the red and yellow magnets around the beam pipe used for deflecting and focusing of the beam. We could walk above the beam pipe on the protective concrete blocks.

We took 15 Year 12 students to the Rutherford Laboratory for a day of varied activities centred around Particle Physics. There was a tour of the Diamond accelerator, a space-age looking silver doughnut shaped building where electrons are accelerated to very high speed and then as they circulate they emit intense radiation, for example X rays, that can be used to interpret the structure of complex molecules in Medicine or Engineering. We walked above the beam pipe on the metres thick concrete that protects the technicians from this radiation trying to get into our heads the fact that this 235 metre diameter building is today’s ultimate microscope!

A view of one of the computer images from the detector at the LHC in Geneva. Around the beam pipe at the centre are different detectors to identify the kinds of particles emitted from each collision process. Our mission was to find the elusive Higgs Boson, a rather unfair test as it was not on any of the slides our students investigated!

There were also lectures on the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva and Dark Matter; lectures that took no prisoners! Quite high level work, avoiding any of the maths but introducing many quite challenging concepts such as anti-matter, virtual particles and charm! Each speaker exuded the excitement and importance to them of scientific discovery — such a good example for students who wonder why they need to study; the more you study, the more interesting it gets!

We also did a computer exercise the students in pairs analysing images from the LHC detector, identifying the type of particle released by the proton-proton collisions. There was a prize for the group that discovered the Higgs Boson, a particle that they are looking for at CERN and there was one image that had been made up to reveal the Higgs. Unfortunately this year it wasn’t us that won; back to the drawing-board!


Perhaps most important of all to some of the students were the copious croissants, cakes, lunch and coffee available on the day and free to all. Everyone took on board many, many Higgs Bosons and got heavier and heavier!

The Rutherford staff were excellent throughout the day, answering all our questions and enthusiastic about all the work being done. I hope we left the wiser, if heavier, and in class we have launched into the AS study of Particle Physics; the Masterclass served as a really good introduction to the topic.

— Words by Paul Baily, Head of Physics