Subatomic ambitions take five Indian school students to CERN

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A view of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. | Photo Credit: CERN

A group of Indian school students are among the five winning teams of the 13th edition of the ‘Beamline for Schools’ competition, a physics competition for high school students from all around the world organised by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva.

The Indian team, named “attoPION”, comprises Nenavath Abhay Vivek, Sidhartha Aniket Jaiswal, Ayush Bhardwaj, Aarush Mandala, and Aritra Sadhukhan. They are from Bansal Junior College Nizamabad; Greenwood High International School, Bengaluru; The Shri Ram Global School, Greater Noida; and Purv International School, Durgapur.

They found each other through different science competitions they participated in.

A beamline is a facility that provides high-energy fluxes of subatomic particles that can be used to conduct experiments in different fields, including fundamental physics, material science and medicine. The other four winning teams are from Bangladesh, Türkiye, the U.K., and the U.S.

The Indian students’ project was based on a process called pion charge exchange. In particle physics, pions are subatomic particles that can have a positive, negative or neutral charge. The students tried to measure how often a charged pion turns into a neutral one when it hits “light” atoms like lithium and beryllium, and they looked at this change of charge at specific energy levels.

These readings are of interest for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a large physics experiment under construction in the U.S.

When neutrinos hit an atom, they produce pions. If the pions change their charge before they even leave the atom, it can mess up the data scientists see, the students said. Recording how often this change takes place in lithium and beryllium will allow scientists to model it correctly in their simulations.

Winners of the 2026 CERN Beamline for Schools competition: “Team PionIST 3” from Türkiye (top left), “Team POLARIS” from Bangladesh (top centre), “Team Mobile MIPs” from the UK (right), “Team Centauri Stars” from the U.S. (bottom left) and “Team attoPION” from India (bottom centre). (Images: Team PionIST 3, POLARIS, Team Mobile MIPs, Team Centauri Stars, Team attoPION). | Photo Credit: Beamline for Schools, CERN

When the students started, they did not have any formal training in particle physics.

“We were just a group of 11th and 12th graders who were obsessed with the subject,” they said. “In the beginning, it felt like we were trying to solve a high-level puzzle without having the box with the picture on it. We spent so much time reading papers and talking to mentors just to get our heads around the theory.” 

The students said they spent several hours every day in the three to four weeks before the competition. While the first week was mostly about recruiting and forming a team, the next three weeks were a complete grind.

The team started with the basics, with Griffiths Introduction to Elementary Particles (1987) serving as their main reference book. They also said A Tour of the Subatomic Zoo (1992) gave them their first big picture and that YouTube lectures by experts at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and courses on the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) kept them going.

“Once we had the basics, we moved to CERN documentation and research papers from CERN and other institutions,” they continued. “For the Geant4 simulations, we used CERN’s official documentation and some of their preloaded models, which we then tweaked to test our own idea in the initial stages.”

Sometimes, understanding just one research paper or one detector concept would take them days.  “We just kept going until the physics finally started making sense,” one of the students said. “We were pulling all-nighters to finish the proposal before the deadline.”

“Sometimes understanding just one research paper or one detector concept would take us days. We feel once you start counting hours, your focus shifts from learning to the clock. We just kept going until the physics finally started making sense.”

Physics that could make sense to high-schoolers was one constraint. Two others were that the participants had to design an experiment from scratch and that it could actually be run at CERN.

So the students proposed a setup to collect data across different energy levels and different types of atoms to see the variations.

“We were nervous because we were so new to this, but after a lot of collaboration and refining the technical details, we felt confident enough to hit the submit button,” they said.

A love for physics in particular was a strong motivation. “We thought of it as an opportunity to try something new and unconventional and learn something during that process,” they added.

Once the team was in place, the students hunted for mentors to guide them. They started by cold-emailing several PhD scholars, postdocs, and graduate students across universities in India and abroad.

They struck luck with Manu Srivastava, a doctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., and received additional feedback on their experimental design from Laxman Mekala at IIT-Bombay.

“My role was purely a supervisory one,” Mr. Srivastava said. “The students came up with different ideas and worked out all the calculations themselves.” He added: “I only had to guide them about which ideas would be more worthwhile to pursue, so in a way just providing direction and giving minimal feedback on their work.”

The students’ discussions among themselves and with Mr. Srivastava were online. “To me, that is a powerful example of how technology is becoming a unifying force at the grassroots level in India, allowing talented students from different regions to come together around a shared scientific goal. Such collaborations would have been much more difficult to imagine even a decade ago,” Mr. Srivastava said.

He added that the students’ achievement was made more remarkable by the competition’s scale. Beamline for Schools is a prestigious international science competition for high-school students and this year attracted more than 700 proposals from around the world.

A lot of students think competitions like this are too tough and not for them, the students said.

“We want to tell them that sometimes the biggest opportunities start from a very simple question or a crazy idea,” they said. “Curiosity is enough to start. If you are curious enough to try, keep learning and do not give up when it gets difficult, you might end up in places you never imagined.”

Looking ahead, the students would like to keep the momentum going, stay connected as a team, and collaborate with other physicists. They would also like to engage in outreach for the BL4S program to help other students.

“All of us are definitely planning to pursue careers in STEM and keep doing our own research. Being at CERN is just the start for us,” they said.

T.V. Padma is a science journalist based in New Delhi.

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