Going to the school of muons

Italian secondary school pupils will be given the opportunity to take part in a large-scale experiment looking at cosmic muons thanks to the EEE Project.


Two Italian pupils building an MRPC muon chamber in CERN's Building 29.

For several months, Italian secondary school pupils have been coming to CERN each week and heading for Building 29. They are not just visiting. They are participating in the EEE (Extreme Energy Events) Project, the aim of which is to carry out a real-life experiment in search of large atmospheric showers using muon detectors located in their schools. In this hall at CERN they are helping to build and test muon chambers - MRPCs (Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers). These chambers, which were invented several years ago by Crispin Williams as part of the LAA Project led by Professor Antonino Zichichi, are similar to those that will be used for ALICE's TOF (Time of Flight) detector at the LHC. In this way, the pupils are receiving a direct, practical and effective initiation to particle physics.

The pupils' first MRPC chambers have now been completed. Once they have been transported to Italy, these large plates of glass and electrodes will be installed in their schools. Three chambers form a detector “telescope” capable of reconstructing the trajectories of cosmic muons. The data will be continuously collected and the detectors checked on a regular basis.

This project is the brainchild of Professor Antonino Zichichi and is financed by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR), the Fermi Centre (Museum of Physics History and Research Centre) and Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). For the time being seven schools are involved in the pilot project, covering all of the Italian peninsula from North to South. Some 50 schools are already on a waiting list and more are expected to join in the project over the coming years, which will result in an ever higher definition coverage.

The pupils not only participate in all the stages of the Project, but also prepare presentations on their work in order to pass on the knowledge they have acquired to other pupils. Courses will be organised at the schools in order to explain the theory and the practice. “The idea is also to promote knowledge transfer to future generations”, explains Silvia Miozzi of INFN, as the chambers will remain in place for successive generations of pupils. Older pupils will explain to younger ones what MRPCs are and what the EEE Project is about.