Subatomic ambitions take five Indian school students to 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.

Tracking pions

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.

Learning the basics

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.