ENGINEERING students from Solihull Sixth Form College got a taste of advanced quantum mechanics over the summer courtesy of a visit to CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider.
Students who were part of the college’s Engineering Academy went of the three-day trip to Switzerland to learn about the work of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
The organisation is currently home to physicists and engineers who are probing the fundamental structure of the universe.
Students discovered how CERN is helping to answer some of the most fundamental questions including how did the universe being and what are the basic building blocks of matter.
Two exhibitions were visited including the Universe of Particles in the Globe and the Microcosm, which explains the experiments at CERN starting from the bottle of hydrogen, the source of protons.
Elizabeth Baker, assistant principal from the Sixth Form College, said: “It was a brilliant trip and the students enjoyed the tour of the facilities, including find out about careers there.
“One talk was projected on to an opalescent, touch-sensitive screen.
“The students engaged fully in this talk, targeted at the level of study of our students and answered questions thrown at them confidently, before asking some challenging ones of their own.
“The final moments of the talk were the ones that they will remember, but to reveal what happened next would spoil it for the next year’s students.”
While in Geneva, students also sampled some of the local culture by visiting a traditional Swiss fondue dinner with musical entertainment.
They also had time to explore the area using trams, buses, boats and trains.
