Continuing its successful seven-years run, Beamline for Schools is ready to kick off the 2021 edition. This physics competition offers high-school students the unique opportunity to carry out an experiment at CERN or in a partner research laboratory. Beamline for Schools has become increasingly popular over the past seven years, with more than 11000 students from around the world having taken part.

The competition is open to teams of five students or more, aged 16 and over, accompanied by at least one adult supervisor or “coach”. To participate, teams should think of a simple, creative experiment and submit a written proposal and a short video proposal. The submission deadline for the 2021 edition is 15 April 2021. The task may seem challenging, or even intimidating, but teams can draw inspiration from previous years’ proposals. The Beamline for Schools team at CERN and the contact person in each country or region stand ready to answer questions and provide guidance.

Each year, two of the teams that compete are selected by a committee of experts to conduct their experiments at a particle physics facility. In 2021, the CERN test-beam area will still be under scheduled maintenance and so cannot host experiments. The experiments will thus be performed at DESY in Hamburg, Germany. DESY is a world-leading accelerator centre and Germany’s national laboratory for particle physics, accelerators and photon science. It offers particle beams and infrastructure where a very wide range of experiments in particle physics, detector development and multidisciplinary science can be conducted.

All participants will receive a certificate. Shortlisted teams will receive a T-shirt and a special prize. Each winning team - up to nine members and two coaches - will be invited, all expenses paid, to DESY for between 10 and 15 days to perform their experiment.

Learn more about the Beamline for Schools competition and registration at http://cern.ch/bl4s.