Research at CERN: Niranjan Nair

You wake up, ready to further your research in one of the largest particle physics laboratories in the world. You’re working in a field that’s relatively unknown, to the point where the Wikipedia page only has six paragraphs. You’re a junior in high school. This was the life of Mass Academy junior Niranjan Nair, who spent two and a half weeks abroad at CERN and DESY in Switzerland and Germany: two of the biggest research centers for particle physics. 

Nair has always liked math and math-adjacent subjects, leading him to an interest in physics. This interest led him to being co-lead of his sending school’s physics club, where Nair and a team of seven other physics club members applied to Beamline for Schools: a competition for high schoolers to submit a research proposal to be carried out at CERN or DESY. 

His team’s project involves a less-observed type of radiation called the Smith-Purcell effect. As he explains, “The Smith-Purcell effect is when you have a charged particle beam going over something called a diffraction grating, which is a type of periodic grating. Specifically, these gratings have to be conductive. When these charged particle beams go at a small distance above these gratings, the grating emits light in roughly the visible spectrum. And that's what we were trying to observe.”

Both the competition itself and the time after was a learning experience. From managing a large group to data analysis, Nair’s experience at CERN exposed him to particle physics research in the real world. 

“Those teams [at CERN and DESY] were able to share a lot about their experience with particle physics…Of course, we’re incredibly grateful for our mentors there. They helped us so much with the whole process, and they were all brilliant. Our actual measurements were taken in the last few days of our time there, which is also a learning experience since what we learned was that a lot of particle physics works like this.”

Back in the US, Nair and his team still have work to do. 

“We have collected all the data that we needed, and we've tried a small bit of data analysis so far, but we have some more data analysis work to do, to find some results in our data. We are somewhat confident we would have seen something. Of course, we can't say for sure at this point but we'll find out.” 

While Nair is uncertain what the future will hold, he urges students to look into their passions, no matter how challenging the field may seem. 

“Particle physics is a very interesting field, and there's so much work that can be done in it. Oftentimes as high school students, we might not find a lot of opportunities in this field. CERN provides a lot of great opportunities for students and a lot of educational resources online. And DESY also provides great resources for students during college as well, such as their summer programs. A lot of these resources provided by these competitions are really excellent and worth checking out. And this also goes for any sort of niche or passion –  there’s often many helpful resources online, and competitions like this one. There's a lot of value in trying to step out like that.”