Indian High School Team Wins CERN Particle Physics Competition

UPDATE - follow-up to Subatomic ambitions take five Indian school students to CERN: Five Indian school students have won the 13th edition of the 'Beamline for Schools' competition organised by CERN in Geneva. The winning team is called attoPION and includes Nenavath Abhay Vivek, Sidhartha Aniket Jaiswal, Ayush Bhardwaj, Aarush Mandala, and Aritra Sadhukhan. They study at Bansal Junior College Nizamabad; Greenwood High International School, Bengaluru; The Shri Ram Global School, Greater Noida; and Purv International School, Durgapur. They met through other science competitions. The competition attracted more than 700 proposals from around the world, with other winning teams coming from Bangladesh, Türkiye, the U.K., and the U.S.

Project Details

The students designed an experiment focused on pion charge exchange. Pions are subatomic particles with positive, negative, or neutral charges. The team measured how often a charged pion turns into a neutral one when it hits light atoms like lithium and beryllium across specific energy levels. These readings help the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in the U.S., where neutrinos hitting an atom produce pions. If pions change charge before leaving the atom, it messes up scientist data, so recording this frequency lets scientists model it correctly in simulations.

Preparation and Mentorship

The students started without formal training in particle physics and spent several hours every day in the three to four weeks before the deadline. The first week involved recruiting and forming a team, while the next three weeks were a complete grind of reading research papers and CERN documentation. They used Griffiths Introduction to Elementary Particles (1987) and A Tour of the Subatomic Zoo (1992) as references, alongside YouTube lectures from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and NPTEL courses. They also used CERN's Geant4 simulations and tweaked preloaded models. To find mentors, they cold-emailed PhD scholars, postdocs, and graduate students. They connected with Manu Srivastava, a doctoral scholar at MIT in the U.S., who provided supervisory guidance and helped them choose which ideas to pursue while the students did all the calculations themselves. They also received feedback from Laxman Mekala at IIT-Bombay.

Context

CERN is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located in Geneva, famous for operating the Large Hadron Collider to study the fundamental laws of nature. The Beamline for Schools competition gives high school students a rare chance to run real scientific experiments using actual particle beams. This milestone highlights how online collaboration tools allow young students from different parts of India to team up and tackle advanced global science topics.