From August 5 to 9, Kuldīga will become a world-renowned gathering place for physicists and engineers, as the 4th High Energy Physics and Accelerator Technology School organized by the Baltic Group of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be held at Kuldīga Central High School. Internationally renowned faculty and researchers will lecture and lead discussions in particle physics and accelerator technology to students from around the world.
The CERN Baltic School is intended for master's and doctoral students, who are offered lectures on the basic aspects of the theory of high-energy physics, focusing on CERN research. The lectures will focus on particle detector and accelerator technologies, experimental methods and high-precision physics measurements obtained using the Large Hadron Collider, which helps researchers capture new physics phenomena.
Students at the CERN School will be lectured by high-profile researchers such as Mark Thomson from the University of Cambridge, John Ellis from King's College London and CERN, Maurizio Vretenar and Jacqueline Keintzel from CERN.
The Latvian researcher working at CERN, Director of the Institute of Particle Physics and Accelerator Technology of Riga Technical University (RTU) Kārlis Dreimanis invites a wider audience - residents of Kuldīga and guests of the city - to the lecture "Particle Physics? Elementary!".
It will take place in the concert hall "Kļaviņš Piano" at 19.00 on August 8. He will tell how the universe was created, what are the laws of physics determining its structure, why the universe still exists. After the lecture, visitors will be able to ask questions, which will be answered by both K. Dreimanis and theoretical physics professor Ilaria Brivio from the University of Bologna.
Researchers at CERN have been searching for answers to questions about the universe for 70 years, studying the properties of the smallest components of the universe - elementary particles. They are helped by a very complex research device - the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider, which sends proton beams towards each other at enormous speed, creating collisions of these particles, where the Big Bang is simulated at very high energy, and scientists study processes in the universe in measurements.
Latvian particle physicists and engineers have also been involved in this research work for several years, because on August 2, 2021, Latvia became a full associate member of CERN. This opens up ample opportunities for Latvian researchers to work in one of the world's most powerful research centers, while for doctoral students to develop their dissertations at CERN. K. Dreimanis leads a group of Latvian researchers at CERN, which works in one of the most important CERN experiments, the purpose of which is to discover new physics phenomena.
The CERN Baltic School is being held for the fourth time this year, it is organized by the RTU Institute of Particle Physics and Accelerator Technologies.
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