During the week of May 7-13 two groups of student and their teachers were involved at CERN in the construction of MRPCs chambers foe a new EEE telescope. Nothing special, expect for the unusual number of students working together in the clean chamber of the EEE laboratory at building 167. If no one mentions the students come from cities 2800 km apart, Moscow and Turin, neither they met before nor they thought to share such an experience. The schools are the Gobetti Segrè Lyceum in Turin and the Lyceum for Chemical Physics in Moscow, with two groups of 4 students and their teachers Damiana Periotto and Fulvio Poglio for italians and Katya Kostyurina and Professor Vladimir Peskov of the Moscow Chemical Physics Institute accompaining russians.
The best description of this experience at CERN certainly comes from the students taking part to the adventure and from Professor Peskov impressions. He was the first taking part into the chamber construction and involving students in efficiency measurements, making the experience a real fieldwork lecture.
Here the words of italian students:
“We think we’re really lucky for being selected as the group taking part to the EEE Project in our school. The whole path has been intense since we started following lectures on particle physics and detectors, then participating to a Workshop in Physics in Turin organized for the EEE schools, and finally going to CERN for the real chambers construction. This experience brought to reality that we always heard about without really understanding.
Thanks to the continuous contact and exchange now we have a much more real idea about what a physicist is, out of the common perception everyone has.
During the week we also worked together with a group of students coming from Moscow, with whom we built the chambers and shared time and ideas. This experience was really the most effective in showing how Science is one of the best way for collaboration among nations for the common wellbeing, a place where prejudice and differences do not exist.
The CERN stay has also been a chance for visiting big experiments as ALICE and CMS and the expositions, finding additional hints for the comprehension of Physics and of the World around us.
We are really thankful to our teachers Damiana Periotto and Fulvio Poglio, and especially to Dr. Ivan Gnesi, for bringing us through this incredible experience.”
…. and Professor Peskov’s
I was always fascinated by the EEE project. This was an excellent scientific and educative idea of Prof A. Zichichi, implemented in practice by his team.
This is why, when I start teaching at the Moscow Lyceum for talent kids, I made a lot of efforts to introduce my students to the EEE project. Fortunately, it turned out that the Lyceum administration is very open to new ideas and opportunities. Around 15 students (15-16 years old) expressed an interest to participate to this project. I delivered them 11 lectures on Astrophysics, High-energy physics and detectors with emphasis on timing RPCs.
On May 7 this year four our students and one physics teacher came to CERN to join Italian students, constructing RPC for their school. Although we are not yet an official member of the project, we were warmly welcome by the EEE RPC training team. The atmosphere was fantastic: we worked together and enthusiastically with Italian high school students and teachers and were patiently guided by the EEE RPC experts. It was a great fun for students to assemble timing RPCs and to feel the atmosphere of a team experimental work. At the end, Ivan Gnesi allowed us to participate in some basic teats of earlie assembled RPCs ready for shipping to Italy. Then, he, Despina Hatzifotiadou and Roman Zuyeuski gave us a lot of explanations how the data acquisition works, how the data are analyses and what results were already obtained.
Our dream now is to officially enter the EEE project.“