Five secondary-school teams, one of them from Belgium, have won the 12th edition of the 'Beamline for Schools' competition organised by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN.
This marks the first such win for a Belgian team.
The international physics contest is open to secondary school students worldwide. Participants are invited to propose a physics experiment to be conducted using a particle accelerator beamline at CERN or one of its partner institutes: DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany) and ELSA (Electron Stretcher Accelerator at the University of Bonn, also in Germany).
In 2025, a committee of scientists from CERN, DESY, and ELSA selected five winning teams from a shortlist of 50 promising experiments. The other winners are from Canada, Mexico,Turkey and the USA.
A record total of 508 teams from 72 different countries submitted proposals.
The Belgian team, Spallateam, is from the Cardinal Mercier College in Braine-l’Alleud in Walloon Brabant. “Our team proposes to compare the number of neutrons emitted by two different spallation targets," the young students from Braine-l’Alleud explained.
"The first target is homogeneous, consisting solely of tungsten, a heavy metal," they said. "The second is a composite target made of tungsten with pieces of aluminium, a light metal.
"We believe that with the second target, the neutron emission will be greater.”
The young Belgians and the Turkish team, Physical, will conduct their experiments at CERN in September 2025.
The Canadian team, Dawson Technicolor, and Mexico's Pumas in Kollision will carry out their experiments at DESY.
The US team, XTReme, will be hosted by the University of Bonn.
