CTU students put Hands on CERN theoretically and practically on the site - News service

Publication date:

2019/12/05

To show CTU students in Prague what it looks like at CERN, what experiments are going on there and what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can do - these were the main goals of the next year's Hands on CERN event held at the Faculty of Nuclear and Physical Engineering in October. Firstly, the participants listened to two lectures on particle physics. Robert Líčeník, a doctoral student of experimental nuclear and particle physics at the FNSPE, introduced the standard particle model and the basics of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory and also discussed current knowledge in this area. Principles of particle acceleration and detection were discussed in the second lecture by Karel Šafařík, who returned to the FNSPE after years spent at CERN, where he helped establish the ALICE experiment. A week later, on 18 October, students independently analyzed real data from the ATLAS experiment.

Based on active participation and motivational essay, the organizers selected fourteen students who went directly to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The excursion took place from 24 to 27 November under the leadership of prof. Boris Tomášik and Katarína Křížková Gajdošová. The students saw the laboratories with their own eyes, and the many experiments that were underway at CERN, visited the LHC accelerator command center and the magnet laboratory for this and future accelerators. They also looked at the underground facilities, where two of the four large LHC experiments are located: LHCb and ALICE, and also visited a data center where data from these experiments and many other sites are processed.

The event was organized by the Department of Physics of FNSPE in cooperation with Prague EPS Young Minds.

Pictures from the event are available here.