Indian school team wins CERN particle physics competition
Five Indian school students have won CERN’s Beamline for Schools competition with a proposal to study how charged pions become neutral after striking lithium and beryllium atoms. The project could help scientists model effects relevant to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in the United States.
Five Indian school students are among the winning teams in CERN’s 2026 Beamline for Schools competition, earning the opportunity to pursue an experiment at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. The team, named attoPION, consists of Nenavath Abhay Vivek, Sidhartha Aniket Jaiswal, Ayush Bhardwaj, Aarush Mandala and Aritra Sadhukhan. The students attend schools and colleges in Nizamabad, Bengaluru, Greater Noida and Durgapur.
Their proposal focuses on pion charge exchange. The students plan to measure how often a charged pion becomes neutral when it strikes light atoms such as lithium and beryllium, examining the process at specified energy levels. The results could be relevant to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, which is under construction in the United States.
When neutrinos strike atoms, they produce pions; if those pions change charge before leaving the atom, the effect can complicate the data recorded by scientists. The team said measurements from lithium and beryllium could help researchers model the process more accurately in simulations. A beamline provides high-energy particle beams used in fields including fundamental physics, materials science and medicine.
The other four winning teams come from Bangladesh, Türkiye, the United Kingdom and the United States. Participants had to design an experiment from scratch that could be carried out at CERN. The Indian students said they had no formal particle-physics training when they began.
They studied textbooks, research papers and CERN documentation, and used Geant4 simulations while refining their design. They said they spent several hours a day preparing during the three or four weeks before the competition. The team also sought help from mentors, including Manu Srivastava, a doctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Laxman Mekala of IIT-Bombay.
Srivastava said the students developed the ideas and calculations themselves, while he mainly helped them decide which avenues were most worthwhile.
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