High-school students: you could win the chance to come to CERN and run a real experiment, register now

High-school students from South Africa and Italy were last year’s winners of the Beamline for Schools competition (video: CERN)

Registration opens today for the Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition. CERN is offering high-school students from around the world the chance to create and perform a scientific experiment on a CERN accelerator beamline. Now in its third year, the competition is open to teams of at least 5 students aged 16 and up with at least one adult supervisor, or “coach”. Previous winners have tested webcams and classroom-grown crystals in the beamline, others have studied how particles decay and investigated high-energy gamma rays.

To enter, register your team name and your coach’s contact details now to start receiving email updates. Find out about the beamline and facilities on this website, then think of a simple, creative experiment. Submit your 1000-word proposal and 1-minute video (both in English only) by midnight (CET) 31 March 2016. In June 2016, CERN will announce between 10 and 20 shortlisted teams, one (maybe two) of these teams will come to CERN.

All participants will receive a certificate. Shortlisted teams will win a BL4S t-shirt for each team member, a cosmic-ray detector for the school and, for some, the chance to visit a nearby physics laboratory. For the winning team(s), nine members and up to two adult coaches per team will be invited, all expenses paid, to CERN for 10 days, preferably in September 2016, to carry out the experiments on the beamline.

Register now: http://cern.ch/bl4s