Centauri Stars Physics Team Wins International CERN Competition

Centaurus high school students were the only U.S. team selected from over 700 applicants worldwide to test their experiment at a professional particle accelerator

It’s always amazing to see hard work and tenacity pay off. That’s exactly what happened on a snowy May morning in 2026 when Centaurus High School physics teacher Kimberly Becker and her physics team got on a virtual call with CERN’s Beamline for Schools program (an international science competition with the European Council for Nuclear Research). The team had been chosen for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to test their experiment in an actual particle accelerator in Germany.

“It was really surprising,” recalled Vibeke Andersen, a member of the physics club since her freshman year. “I think this year we were just putting things in the proposal till the very end, and we weren't really expecting anything.”

When CERN’s Beamline for Schools competition started in 2014, they had 292 teams submit proposals. Fast forward to 2026; this year, more than 700 teams from 89 countries applied. Of these applicants, only five teams were selected. "It's a very unrealistic expectation to win this kind of thing. The last team that won in the U.S. was two or three years ago," mentioned Jack Mueller-Scott, a senior on the team who graduated in Spring 2026. Indeed, this year the Centauri Stars were the only team selected from the U.S.

The purpose of the competition is to give high school physics students access to world-class particle accelerator facilities to put their experiments to the test. This was the seventh proposal submitted by the Centauri Stars, a team that has vied for a winning spot since 2019.

The team has been shortlisted twice, once in 2019 and again in 2024. Thinking about the opportunity ahead, Ms. Becker said, “I'm just excited for the students to get to have this experience and to work at a particle accelerator and get beam time, which is something that even particle physicists don't get very often."

But why was their experiment chosen out of hundreds of other submissions? The team is improving a commonly used tool in particle physics called a DIRC (Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light) detector. The purpose of DIRC detectors is to find and measure super-fast particles and, in doing so, find out more about our universe and how it works.

Ms. Becker explains it best, "We have this glass material that we're going to use to create a type of light [Cherenkov radiation] that is going to bounce around inside the glass. So it kind of works like fiber optic cables." When regular light hits the glass bar it slows down, but when super fast electrons (like those in a particle accelerator) hit the glass bar, they move faster than the light.

“It creates a sonic boom, like when a fighter jet breaks the sound barrier and it creates that cone of sound. It's pretty much the same, but with a blue light through the medium [glass],” Andersen describes.

That cone of light makes an angle, and DIRC detectors can measure that angle, yielding very useful data, says another team member, Dylan Stevens. “The cone is proportional to the velocity. So you can figure out how much momentum, how fast it was."

All of this science is known, but this team is using something new to detect the light: silicon photomultipliers, a game-changer. Stevens elaborates, “They perform better than normal photomultiplier tubes and in magnetic fields. And they're much smaller.” This is why their experiment was chosen.

On August 10th, the team of ten students, plus Ms. Becker and fellow physics teacher Hasan Elsayed, left for the DESY Particle Accelerator Facility in Hamburg, Germany to begin an astonishing 14 days of beamtime. While there, the team worked diligently with DESY scientists day and night to calibrate and test their next-level DIRC detector. Undergoing many trials and tribulations, they collected data up until the last hours of the very last day.

After seven proposals, years of research, and then actually getting precious time with a particle accelerator, Ms. Becker was ready for some good news. “Ultimately, our experiment worked. We made a compact scanning linear SiPM array DIRC detector. It successfully detects Cherenkov radiation and matches predictions. There's some new acronym waiting to be revealed for what this should be called.”

This success is due to the determination and steadfastness of the Centauri Stars Physics team. Nevertheless, it is also an accomplishment for Centaurus High School and Boulder Valley School District as a whole.

“Anytime I would come to my admin team with like, ‘Hey, we want to try this new big, crazy thing that's really out there and a long shot’ and everybody just says, ‘go for it!’" In the last two years, BVSD’s Building for Student Success bond project has allowed the engineering wing at Centaurus to be expanded, creating improvements for this kind of research.

James Morton, the electrical engineering department head at CU Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), met the team this summer and shared, “Boulder Valley School District is doing a great job inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers and connecting them with opportunities to apply their knowledge, to really propel them as they go into college. I can't even imagine what it would be like to hit your freshman year and be like, ‘I've already been to CERN and done real physics experiments.’"

However, none of this would be possible if not for the leadership and support of Ms. Becker. "Ms. Becker especially has helped us. She points us in the right direction. She has amazing connections that help us get this stuff done," Mueller-Scott comments.

Indeed, through all the years, one person has been there through the ups and downs, guiding generation after generation of students to success.

Ms. Becker reflects on this accomplishment, "It's probably the most challenging thing that any of us have ever done—taking on this kind of upper-level science work as high school students and teachers. It actually means something for the world. And it's not classroom science. It's real science."