The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN (derived from the name Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Every year, this center offers a summer program for students, which gives them the opportunity to participate in its different activities for a period of eight to thirteen weeks. This year, only one Peruvian student was selected by the CERN among the thousands of contestants around the world: PUCP student Franco Delgado.
Franco is a senior year student of Physics, and he also works as a TA at our university. His passion for his field of study encouraged him to participate on the application process of the CERN Summer Student Programme, which he discovered while visiting this investigation center’s webpage.
Through the Summer Student Programme, the CERN brings undergraduate students to its headquarters in Geneva so they can work in its facilities. Franco’s duty was focused on the ATLAS experiment, which is one of the four largest particle detectors at the CERN. “My task was focused on the calorimetry of the detector. Basically, we were looking for a new method of measuring the responses of the ATLAS calorimeters” he explains.
Even though the research conducted by the CERN is a lot more advanced that the one that is being conducted here in Peru –and in Latin America in general- Franco claims that the investigations he carried out at the PUCP regarding muon detection as a member of the High Energy Group of our university (GAE-PUCP) were advantageous during his time in Switzerland. “The research I carried out with professor (Alberto) Gago and professor (Jose) Bazo was very useful, because the data analysis and processing that I learned with this investigation were similar to the ones that I carried out at the CERN, the difference is that I used more data there” he says.
