We are delighted to announce our ongoing partnership with the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation in support of the Beamline for Schools Competition (BL4S) 2020.

For the second time, the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation - Germany's most important private institution that supports scientific research and education with an emphasis on physics – has chosen to make a difference in science education for young students, by supporting the CERN & Society Foundation and Beamline for Schools.

2019 marked the beginning of a new era for the Competition as for two years, (2019-2020), all accelerators at CERN have been switched off for maintenance and upgrades. This also concerns the beamline that has hosted the BL4S experiments so far. In 2019, the Competition was hosted at one of the most technologically advanced particle physics laboratories, the German Electron Synchrotron - DESY, in Hamburg, Germany. This offered a unique opportunity to transfer the BL4S paradigm to another country and thereby further spreading CERN’s spirit of scientific curiosity to even more young people. The Competition will be hosted once again at DESY in 2020.  

In the six years of BL4S, 1114 teams with more than 10,000 high-school students have taken part in the Competition, coming from 84 different countries worldwide. What’s more, three of the winning teams have already published a peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of the Institute of Physics (IOP).

Thank you once again to the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation for their valuable contribution!

To find out more about the competition, CERN's and DESY's beamline and experimental facilities, and to read about winning teams and experiments from previous years, please go to the BL4S website. 

BL4S is a CERN & Society project supported by external funding. To learn more about CERN & Society activities and how you can be involved, visit our dedicated page.