Portsmouth College students hunt for dark matter on trip to CERN, the world's largest particle physics lab

During the visit in October to the site on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, students discovered how CERN is helping to answer some of the most fundamental questions, such as how did the Universe begin and what are the basic building blocks of matter?

Scientific breakthroughs such as the discovery of the Higgs boson require experimental machines on a large scale and the students gained an appreciation of the technical and engineering challenges that the multinational experimental collaborations at CERN face.

Toby Hickey from Portsmouth College said: 'It has really put the work we are doing in lessons in perspective as to what is happening in the real world.'

Sarah Fanner, also a Physics student at the college, added that the collaborative work done at CERN by the multinational team of scientists was interesting and she would consider working in such an environment in the future.

CERN is undergoing a major upgrade of the lab’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Work began on the £1.1bn High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) last year, which presented a unique opportunity for students from Portsmouth College to visit the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS).

The CMS is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It has a broad physics programme ranging from studying the Standard Model (including the Higgs boson) to searching for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.

The UK has been a member of CERN since the organisation was founded in 1954. Membership allows British researchers to take a wide variety of roles that contribute to CERN’s ongoing success, from recently-qualified technicians and university undergraduates gaining their first taste of working in an international environment to PhD students analysing experimental data and experienced engineers and physicists leading projects or representing their experimental collaborations.

The Portsmouth College students’ visit was led by a member of the CERN community, who spoke from personal experience about their contribution to CERN’s research programme.

To find out more about Portsmouth College's science courses and educational visits, go along to the next Open Evening on Wednesday February 12, 5.30pm-7.30pm. Applications for Level 3 courses close on Friday February 28.

To discover more about the college, click here