CERN Research Program

By  JUNO COWANS, ERIN HAN, LILY RAMPE, MARVIN SHIM, KEVIN THANT

During the two weeks between Sept. 14 and 28, as most Exonians rushed into their second week on campus, a small group of current uppers, seniors, and class of 2023 alumni traveled to Geneva, Switzerland. There, the team conducted research at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The team’s proposal, over four months in the making, was reviewed and selected out of 379 teams across the world, earning them a trip to CERN. There, Exeter’s team spent two weeks working with CERN scientists and touring the lab’s ultramodern facilities, finally equipped with the machinery to execute their experiment.

Physics Instructor James DiCarlo introduced their opportunity at CERN. “For a physicist, going to CERN is like going to Disney World,” he said. “Around every corner there’s some new fascinating thing.”

Starting in the winter of 2023, team leader and current senior Ishaan Vohra assembled a team consisting mainly of Exeter Physics Club members drawn to the opportunity. Class of 2023 graduate and former Physics Club co-head Isabella Vesely explained, “Since then we’ve done everything from ideation to research on existing theory to full particular simulations [together].”

“We did some simulations of our original idea and put together probably dozens of engineering design iterations,” Vesely continued. “That combination led up until mid-April, when we submitted our proposal to CERN scientists.”

The team proposed to assemble and test a modular halbach ray. “With the support of Mr. Dicarlo and Mr. Saltman, as well as the guidance of external experts at Fermilab, the University of Liverpool, and Denmark Technical University, our proposal finally came together in the last few weeks before the mid-April deadline. Before we knew it, we had submitted our idea,” Vohra said.

In preparation for the trip, the team held frequent meetings to familiarize themselves with the equipment they would soon get their hands on. Senior Achyuta Rajaram recalled, “We had several meetings with our wonderful support scientists Martin and Berare, where we learned immensely about the detectors and experimental setups that turned our proposal into a reality. Additionally there was a learning curve with regards to the software tools like ROOT that we got started on in the summer.”

Nominally, DiCarlo was the coach of the team, but he continuously emphasized that the project was student-led. “I was the chaperone. I was nominally also the ‘coach’ of the PEA team, though they really didn’t need one. I tried to keep tabs on everyone’s health and well-being. I offered my thoughts on data analysis and interpretation,” DiCarlo said.

From the student perspective, upper Peter Morand echoed, “We were not simply Exonians — we were a team of Exonians on a mission, and Mr. DiCarlo was as excited as we were.”

DiCarlo continued to share the extraordinary experience of traveling to CERN. “It was amazing to join in on these experiments. Once everything was up and running (a non-trivial state), we could simply enter into the beamline computer that we wanted particles whose momentum was three giga electron-volts, as if we were just ordering something online from DoorDash!” 

DiCarlo detailed, “They’d come flooding down the tube — electrons with a momentum of three giga electron-volts traveling at 99.99985 percent of the speed of light!”

When arriving at CERN, the team did face some setbacks in the form of malfunctioning detectors and parts, but senior William Soh elaborated on the support he found with the people at CERN. “It was really interesting to see how collaborative CERN is, and it was amazing to see so many people from all different parts of CERN come together whenever we had a problem. It was amazing to see how supportive and helpful the people at CERN were whenever we had problems,” Soh explained.

With regards to the laboratory’s facilities, Aubrey Zhang ‘23 shared, “CERN’s facilities in terms of equipment and technology were really a sight to behold. Seeing all of it really gave me a sense of the lengths we humans can go to just for the sake of understanding the world we live in.”

Senior William Lu listed the important steps of the group’s proposal, including “Initial research (finding problems), finding an interesting starting problem (linear halbach arrays), thinking about real world problems (dipole bending magnets in accelerators), thinking back to lin halbach array, finding permanent magnet circular halbach array, thinking about how we can improve the design (modularity).”

“And winning,” Lu added.

Zhang shared some of his favorite moments in the laboratory, including “Witnessing a helium leak simulation at a life sized model of the LHC, simply seeing all the equipment (detectors, accelerators, et cetera) that I’ve only read about before, presenting in the auditorium where the higgs boson’s discovery was announced, talking and working with CERN’s scientists.”

For Vesely, “One of the coolest parts about this experience was seeing how much it related to what we did at Exeter. For example, we saw the first particle accelerator ever at CERN, and it was built on the premise of something that we actually studied in the Physics 500 sequence.”

“We had done the calculations a few years ago when we took this class and a few of us that were in the same class all recognized it. So it definitely was a really fun moment to tell Mr. DiCarlo that we did indeed remember this one random problem from his class,” Vesely continued.

Students noted other highlights outside of the lab space from this two-week experience. “On a more casual note, our day trip to Geneva was extremely fun and relaxing, as a break away from the hard work we were doing,” Rajaram said.

In addition to the opportunities directly offered by CERN, Vesely also shared a special collaborative moment from the trip. “Definitely another big [moment] was working with a team from another place in the world — from Pakistan. None of us had ever been to Pakistan and the Pakistani kids had never been to the States, so it was a really cool experience working with people from very different backgrounds and hearing about their ideas. They had their own experiment that meshed really well with ours.”

“Then through some of the events that we had,” Vesely continued, “we actually gave a tour to the US Ambassador of the United Nations of our own experiment, which was crazy, [since] she actually had questions and things that she was wondering about our experiment.”

For the eight team members, their two weeks at CERN proved to be an invaluable time spent utilizing state-of-the-art facilities alongside scientists who offered continual help along their experimental process. Though they may not be surrounded by as many particle detectors at any given moment during the year, the group brings newfound knowledge and experience guaranteed to stick with them through all of their scientific pursuits.