Last Thursday 20 students, Mrs Green and Mr Davies got on a coach, bright and early, heading for Geneva for the biannual Physics trip to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. 

We arrived at a much warmer and sunnier Geneva mid afternoon and walked to our accommodation which is just a couple of streets back from the shores of Lake Geneva. 

We all got up early on the Friday and headed for CERN on the tram – Geneva’s public transport is amazing! Our tour with a Russian Physicist currently working on the Atlas project, one of the collision sites on the collider, took us to the Cryogenics and Electromagnet departments situated on the first of the circular accelerators where subatomic particles are accelerated to within 99.9999% of the speed of light before being crashed into each other to create new particles, some of which would have existed fractions of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This tour focused on the phenomenal engineering feats required to actually make the collider work, how to manage and narrow the beams of protons, how to manage the tremendous forces exerted when the beams collide and how to make the process as efficient as possible.  In order for the magnets to be strong enough they are cooled using liquid Helium at 1.9K (that’s colder than space!), the Helium becomes a superfluid and defies gravity, whilst also helpfully slowing down any stray air particles in the tube to create a near perfect vacuum. Due to the enormous changes in temperature, the 27km diameter ring has to be able to withstand an expansion / contraction difference of 80m!! Hopefully you get the idea that our minds were well and truly blown and it was a fantastic experience. 

To add to the surrealism, we finished the day off with an alpine meal at a local hotel, complete with an accordion playing, yodelling and bell ringing singer! 

On our last day we headed up the mountains surrounding Lake Geneva, up a cable car to Mont Saleve, which was actually in France! A couple of hours of shopping (mainly of the window variety) in Geneva and it was time to return home. We packed a lot into the trip and the students were fantastic.  

Thank you so much to Operations, Finance and everyone who support these trips which we hope have made some very happy memories for life and perhaps inspired some of the leading Scientists, Engineers and Mathematicians of the future.