I supervised one of the three winning teams in the Beamline for Schools competition, an international physics contest for high school students organized by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Geneva, Switzerland, and DESY (the German Electron Synchrotron) in Hamburg, Germany.
Our team’s proposal focused on designing, building, and testing an affordable, homemade, multiwire proportional chamber (MWPC), a particle detector that tracks charged particles by detecting ionization events within its chambers. The signals from these chambers provide valuable data on the trajectory and energy of the detected particles. Our goal was to use accessible, low-cost materials to reduce the cost of a MWPC, making it more achievable for hobbyists, small research groups, and schools.
Our MWPC was tested at the DESY II electron beamline, studying various properties to analyze the validity and reliability of our detector. The results highlighted the MWPC's capabilities and outlined avenues for future research.