海角涩区

Nine 海角涩区 students are heading to Hamburg this September after winning a major international science competition. The 鈥満＝巧�区 Technicolor鈥� team will spend two weeks at DESY, Germany鈥檚 renowned particle physics laboratory, to test their own detector using a particle accelerator.

The student-initiated project began nearly a year ago in the context of the 海角涩区 High Energy Physics group, accompanied by Physics faculty members Manuel Toharia and Joel Trudeau. With funding from the 海角涩区 Foundation, the team designed and built a muon detector called The Scintillating Chamber during the winter 2025 semester. Teacher Manuel believes this prototype was key to the team鈥檚 winning in CERN鈥檚 prestigious .

Out of 508 participating schools worldwide, the largest number in the competition鈥檚 history, 海角涩区 was among just five winning teams. They are the first group from Quebec and only the second from Canada to achieve this distinction since the program began in 2014.

鈥淚t is absolutely amazing that a group of CEGEP students can submit their experiment ideas and that scientists at some of the largest scientific institutions in the world will take them seriously and help them pursue their ideas,鈥� said team member Leandro Perez Moran, who is 17 and in Enriched Pure and Applied Science. 鈥淲e are living proof that you don’t need a degree to consider yourself a scientist, the only requirements are curiosity and the will to persevere through the problems you will surely meet.鈥�

鈥淭hey are doing PhD-level work,鈥� Manuel said, noting that most of the students are only starting their second year at 海角涩区 but are already working well beyond the scope of typical CEGEP or even undergraduate science studies.

The students invested months of effort in designing, building, coding and coordinating.聽鈥淥ur project requires cooperation from every person in our group,鈥澛爐hey explained.聽鈥淪ince the tasks are shared, the hardware and the software must be in tune with each other. Everyone has responsibilities to fulfill to make sure everything goes smoothly once all the various parts are put together.鈥�

Accessibility is an important goal for the team. 鈥淭raditional detectors are impractical to build and dangerous to operate,鈥� said team leader Tian Yi (Alex) Xia, who is 18 and in Enriched Pure and Applied Science. 鈥淭he Scintillating Chamber was designed to address these issues by using safer standard parts and providing open-source documentation online.鈥�

Their work also drew attention and support from well beyond 海角涩区. 鈥淚’ve been amazed by the amount of support our team has received not just from 海角涩区 staff, but also from universities and the private sector,鈥� said co-team leader Aljoscha Ziegler, who is 18 and in the Enriched Pure and Applied Science program. 鈥淗aving been taken seriously by professionals in the field of particle physics is very rewarding and a nice validation of the efforts our team has been making.鈥�

Teammate Danah D茅z茅m茅, who is 18 and in Pure and Applied Science, added:聽鈥淲ith the right funding and support, any research project can come to life and enrich the scientific community. I’ve also come to realize the importance of patience and perseverance in science because things will go wrong, and we have to keep pushing through in order to learn from our attempts and ultimately succeed.鈥�

At DESY, the team鈥檚 detector will be exposed to a controlled particle beam for testing and calibration. Their scientific question: whether ideas from computer science can inspire new designs in particle physics. As they explained,聽鈥渢he arrangement of the rods is inspired by binary encoding, a method commonly used by computer scientists.鈥�

From September 10鈥�25, the students will set up the detector, conduct experiments, collect data, and troubleshoot alongside professional researchers. They hope to learn聽鈥渉ow (the DESY scientists) design their experiments, how they ensure no sources of error are included in experiments and what anomalies the DESY scientists are studying.鈥�

Team leader Alex Xia credited the 海角涩区 Foundation for making the project possible:聽鈥淭he Student Academic Growth and Enrichment Fund was key to procuring all of our parts; this project would have been impossible without their pledge, and confidence in our vision. I thank them again, on behalf of the whole team, for believing in us.鈥�

The team plans to continue working on the project when they return from Germany: 鈥淲e hope to continue refining our detector and find different applications for it. One avenue we鈥檙e hoping to follow is using our detector for tomography, which is the process of measuring muon flux through a volume to come up with its image and size. We鈥檙e hoping to use this method to measure ice thickness, which could then be used in spatial exploration.鈥�

The 海角涩区 Technicolor team includes David Birnbaum, Tykhon Byshkin, Matvey Chirchikov, Danah D茅z茅m茅, Arij Mohamedi, Leandro Perez Moran, Evan Parasol, Ari Polterovich, Milo Belarbi-Tabourier, Tian Yi (Alex) Xia, Chun On (Andy) Yu, and Aljoscha Ziegler.