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APPEAL 9 – Year of Engineering 2018

Making Big Science Happen

With the designation of 2018 as the Year of Engineering, now is a great time to discuss with A-level pupils the connections between engineering, particle physics and particle accelerators.

Particle accelerators present engineers with a variety of challenges at the forefront of technology. Engineers build and test the equipment and systems required by accelerators. Building a particle accelerator, for example, can require civil engineering: digging tunnels and installing large infrastructure projects. Other engineers design and build accelerator components: radiofrequency cavities must be crafted to just the right shape and size to boost particles along accelerators; thousands of large custom-built electromagnets focus particle beams and guide them around bends in circular accelerators; and the world’s largest cryogenic system cools magnets on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to close to absolute zero, so that the wires supplying their electricity can work in a superconducting state without losing energy to resistance.

The University of Oxford is organising in collaboration with CERN a one-day school to give A-level teachers an opportunity to learn about the phenomena and challenges which connect engineering, particle physics and particle accelerators. This school is designed for physics teachers who are not necessarily physics specialists. Preference will be given to teachers coming from schools which usually send very few pupils to University.

Teachers will have the opportunity to learn more about particle accelerators, connections between engineering and particle accelerators, and phenomena being studied with particle accelerators – such as the Higgs boson(s) and the search for dark matter. The school will address questions such as "What is the origin of the Universe and of matter?", "How do the LHC and other particle accelerators work?", "What are some of the engineering challenges for particle accelerators?" and "What are the applications of particle accelerators in our daily lives?"

Past APPEAL events were very successful and we are looking forward to a very interesting and thought-provoking event this year as well.

The APPEAL-9 event will take place on Saturday, 30 June 2018 at the University of Oxford.

To take part in this school please register here before the Friday, 15 June 2018

There are no registration fees for the teachers to participate in the event. The organisers are grateful for the support received from the following organisations: