The ATLAS Control Room, the antimatter factory, and even the very first particle accelerator. Talented young people from the Pilsen region visited the famous research complex, which they had, until now, only known from lectures.
Twenty-two students from the Pilsen region, members of the GoHigher talent community, had the opportunity to see places that even many scientists dream about. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by the acronym CERN, is the Mecca of science. In the laboratories on the French-Swiss border, the Internet was born in the past, and their present and future are closely linked to experiments and the study of particles smaller than atoms.
The GoHigher expedition did not choose CERN as a destination by chance. Particle physics is one of the most attractive scientific fields, and young gifted people want to learn as much about it as possible. For example, Jiří Dolejší from the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics at Charles University gave them a lecture on the topic one January afternoon as part of the GoHigher Inspiration series.
The excursion took place from 7th to 10th May 2025. Before visiting CERN, the talented pupils from Pilsen stopped in Winterthur, Switzerland, home to the Technorama Science Center. “During a few hours, we tried out all kinds of exhibits covering various fields of physics, from mechanics and optics to electrodynamics,” described one of the participants.
Friday, 9th May, was the main day. This year, CERN is celebrating its 70th anniversary, and GoHigher welcomed the students with a packed program. They were thrilled by the ATLAS Control Room, which operates at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). However, they had learned a lot of interesting information already during the journey:
“Our guide, Lukáš Kovanda, explained to us how the cascade of particle accelerators works, as well as the process of detecting the resulting collisions. Simply put, in quantum physics, completely illogical things happen: high-speed collisions can produce particles that didn’t exist in the original elements at all. It’s as if a collision between two cars could create an aircraft carrier! We also learned that the vast majority of accelerated particles are protons, which come from an ordinary pressurized hydrogen cylinder. The hydrogen is thermally ionized, the protons are separated from the electrons, and that’s it. An interesting fact was that if the cylinders and pipelines were perfectly sealed, CERN would only need a single ordinary hydrogen cylinder for 100,000 years!”
Right in the ATLAS building, the secondary school pupils first watched a short educational film and then headed to the exhibition, from where they took a look directly into the control room itself. The structure of the detector, the storage of experiment results, the smart automatic system that can spot more interesting collisions inside the accelerator are some of the topics that their guide talked about, too.
The tour continued to the Synchro-Cyclotron, the very first particle accelerator built by CERN in 1957, and the next stop was the so-called antimatter factory. The following paragraph shows how impressed GoHigher was by the factory:
„We learned about the origin of antimatter when our guide introduced matter and antimatter as two analytical solutions to a mathematical equation, just like two roots of a quadratic equation, which was theoretically predicted by Dirac long before it was actually produced. He explained to us that antimatter, or more precisely antihydrogen, is created by combining an antiproton and a positron, whereby positrons can be obtained by simple beta plus decay and antiprotons by a rare nuclear reaction that occurs in only one of half a million cases, in which an iridium plate is bombarded with ordinary protons, i.e., hydrogen cations. Then all that remains is to combine the antiproton and positron into a pair, and suddenly we have antihydrogen.
At CERN, they are studying the properties of antimatter, especially its behaviour in a gravitational field. It is not surprising that in recent years it has been proven that antimatter falls down in a gravitational field just like ordinary matter. They are even planning to export antimatter to a related experiment at DESY in Germany, so it is possible that in the future we will see trucks literally transporting antimatter on German highways. All that is needed is an electromagnetic field to prevent annihilation with matter, and otherwise antihydrogen is stable.”
The excursion concluded with an interactive workshop, during which GoHigher members first assembled a cloud chamber and then analysed the tracks of various particles, learning to distinguish their types based on shape and track length. Before leaving for Pilsen, they spent an afternoon visiting Geneva.
