​This summer 9 students joined the particle physics department for 8 weeks of their holiday and we caught up with them towards the end to see what they thought of it.

Select a name to find out more!

If you're interested in joining us as a summer student please click here to find out how to apply and more.

Mihaela has just finished her 3rd year of Physics with Particle Physics at the University of Birmingham and is now going into her master's year. Her particular project was focused on looking at displaced leptons in the inner tracker (ITK) of ATLAS, an experiment that is part of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Maruf is a second-year student from The University of Surrey. He worked with the ATLAS Athena software framework, looking at software RAM usage. His work demonstrated potential memory and CPU improvements by using different memory allocators.

Katie, our other 2nd-year student, is from the University of Portsmouth and studies Astrophysics and Cosmology. She said the 8 weeks helped her realise the importance of technical work supporting experiments, and improved her understanding of how projects come together while gaining experience in worldwide collaboration.

Davit who studies Theoretical Physics at The University of Manchester arrived with already solid background knowledge from hackathons and previous work experience. Davit praises the amount of support he had during his time here as well as how interested and how much potential staff see in students.

Enrico who is also from The University of Manchester, studying physics and theoretical physics, has been looking at Dark Matter this summer, looking at a new way of observing Dark Matter particle collisions. Moving forward, Enrico found that the work helped his understanding of the physics he learnt at university, and improved his confidence in independent research.

To complete our trio of Manchester University students we have Dan who studies pure physics. He says he’s always had an interest in particle physics (it being his favourite branch of physics) and coding as well, which luckily often go hand in hand. He tells us he's gained proficiency in ROOT (a CERN program for analysing particle physics data), and a better overall understanding of how particle detectors work and how the research process works.

Adam from Liverpool University was the only student not at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; instead, he spent the summer up at the Boulby Underground Laboratory on a quite unique placement. He loved the group he worked with and hopes to come back for events as well as one day conduct his own research there.

Richard is a 3rd-year undergraduate student at Magdalene College of the University of Cambridge reading Natural Sciences, specialising in Physics. Richard was working on a team developing a new trigger (the system that decides what data to keep or delete) as part of the CMS upgrade, another LHC detector.

Danny is from Lancaster University and his work focused on the Pixel endcaps which sit at either end of the inner tracker (ITK) or as he described it “the bit closest to where the magic happens” in the ATLAS detector. Despite frustration with programs, equipment and calibration, all dealt with through a steady flow of sarcasm, he says it has been “a fantastic experience”.