CERN Beamline for Schools 2017 Student Experiment: Search for Isolated Fractionally Charged Particles

Abstract

This article was mainly written by a team of high school students that have won the CERN Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition in 2017. They had some help from professional scientists, in particular Branislav Ristic. The team had proposed to set up an experiment to search for elementary particles with a fractional electric charge. This paper describes the preparation of their proposal, experimental setup, detectors and data analysis throughout the search for such particles using a 10GeVc-1 proton beam with a fixed iron target. It was clear to the team that the chance for finding such particles in a relatively simple experiment was minimal but that by doing this experiment they would learn a lot about experimental physics. Due to large amounts of noise, the result of the experiment is inconclusive. Further experimentation to search for these hypothesized particle is encouraged.