On Thursday 28 January, 13 students from Year 11-13 at the High School attended a virtual tour of the ATLAS facility at CERN. Usually we have been able to go to Switzerland to the CERN facility in person, but due to the current restrictions this was the next best thing. We started with an introduction from physicist Dr Muhammad Alhroob who told us about the facility and answered questions, including about his career journey working at CERN. Then Dr Clara Nellist took us into the underground section of ATLAS and explained how the detector works and impressed us all with the size of the machinery and the scope of the engineering.

The students asked lots of insightful questions about the physics, the engineering and about Dr Nellist’s career. We learnt about superconducting magnets, the proton beam, how the collision particles are detected and about the cost, scope and politics behind an international collaboration of this magnitude.

It was a brilliant morning – and we even got to see a retinal scanner in operation!