Announcement of BL4S winning teams 2020
After a long evaluation process of almost 200 proposals, this year's winning teams have been selected: The team "Nations' Flying Foxes" from the International School of Geneva, Campus des Nations, Switzerland, and the team "ChDR-CHEESE" from the Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium in Berlin, Germany. Congratulations!
These two teams have proposed two very different experiments. This illustrates the wide spectrum of research questions that are possible within the boundary conditions of BL4S. The team Nations' Flying Foxes from Switzerland wants to detect a particle known as Δ+ Baryon. When high energy electrons interact with protons, these protons can be converted into the Δ+ particle. As the particle has a very short lifetime, the team will have to look for indirect signatures pretty much in the same way as short-lived particles are detected in the large experiments at CERN and DESY.
The team ChDR Cheese from Germany wants to use a physics effect known as Cherenkov Diffraction Radiation (ChDR) as the basis of an innovative technology for the diagnosis of particle beams in accelerators. When particles move along certain materials such as fused silica, photons can be created while the particle beam itself is not disturbed. The properties of these photons, however, provide information about the beam that is valuable for the accelerator control system.
Read the full press release here.