A Highschooler’s Guide to GeV-Range Electromagnetism

Abstract

The following article has been written primarily by the high school students who make up the team “Cryptic Ontics”, one of the two winning teams in the 2018 edition of CERN’s Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition, and is based on the set of experiments the students endeavoured to conduct over the course of a two-week period at CERN. Reconstructing influential physical theories from scratch often helps in uncovering hitherto unknown logical connections and eliciting instructive empirical checkpoints within said theory. With this in mind, in the following article, a top-down reconstruction (beginning with the experimental observations and ending at the theoretical framework) of the Lorentz force equation is performed, and potentially interesting questions which come up are explored. In its most common form, the equation is written out as: [Formula: see text]. Only the term that includes the magnetic field [Formula: see text] will be dealt with for this article. The independent parameters we use are (i) the momenta of the particles, (ii) the charge (rather, the types) of particles, either positive or negative, and (iii) the current passing through the dipole generating the electromagnetic field. We then measure the angle by which particles get deflected while varying these three parameters and derive an empirical relationship between them.