Visit to CERN

Responding to students desire for learning and information on the scientific and technological issues of concern to the international scientific community, our School organized and implemented a study visit to the EuropeanElementary Physics Center CERN on 17 December 2019.

Located on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, it was founded in 1954, bringing together experts from 12 founding member states (including Greece). CERN is one of the first European efforts to realize a common vision.

Research at CERN is characterized as Big Science Research, that is to say, which requires the contribution of many states.

The excursion was attended by 41 students from the 2nd and 3rd grade of high school with their accompanists, Mrs. Tsatsoula Maria (physicist) Mrs. Nalbandantou Popi (computer science) Mr. Pachni Kostas (biologist) and Mr. Alatzoglou Athanasios (gymnast).

Our students during the long visit were informed by the Greek scientists working in the research center, the purpose it serves, the basic functions of the accelerator and the course of the particles within it for the big questions they are asked such as: what is the Higgs particle, what is supersymmetry and what happens to the superconductivity of the materials.

In particular we visited the CM18 magnets area. There, the children in groups of 10 were thoroughly informed by Greek scientists of exactly how the LHC, the large Hadron accelerator, works, what its components are: bond tubes, acceleration structures and bending magnets, bipolar to keep the beams in circular orbit creating magnetic fields 150000 times stronger than Earth's PM, quadrupole magnets (with four magnetic poles) to focus the beams, and thousands of additional hexagonal and octopal magnets (magnets) each respectively) for adjusting the beam width and position, for special materials (niobium and titanium) from which all magnetic coils and accelerator cavities are made and which become superconductors a very low temperature so that the electrical current generated electric and magnetic fields without resistance.

We were told that in order to reach their optimum performance, the magnets had to be cooled to -271.3 ° C (1.9K) - a temperature well below that of space, and that for this reason, a large part of the accelerator is connected to a circulating system of liquid nitrogen and helium. Only one-eighth of the LHC's cooling distribution system could be the largest refrigerator in the world.
We also visited the simulation of NASA's AMS space station probe, a project in Cern's collaboration with NASA in search of antimatter, and the cern's data center where several hundred computers work together to combine information. At the top of the computer hierarchy is a very fast system that decides - in a fraction of a second - whether an event is interesting or not. There are many different criteria for selecting potentially important events, so the huge amount of data coming from 600 million events is reduced to a few hundred events per second, which are now thoroughly investigated.