Yet another time, R. N. Podar has marked its name on the globe. In the competition organised by CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), Geneva for schools, R. N. Podar’s team has won a fully funded trip to visit the CERN, and carry on their experiment. Being the first team to win this competition in the Asia Zone, the school’s team Cryptic Ontics has competed with 950 other teams internationally.

CERN, Beamline for Schools gives chance to high school students all over the world to propose a scientific experiment and depending upon the creativity, originality, feasibility and many other factors, jury selects one team and fully funds the team to visit Geneva campus, and work with the professors, engineers and other experts at CERN on cutting edge accelerator physics. The teams have to submit a research proposal document as well as a minute long video explaining their experiment.

Cryptic Ontics consisting of — Kiranbaskar Velmurugan, Pulkit Malhotra, Aditya Dwarkesh, Satchit Chatterji, Jinal Shah, Anushree Ganesh, Aayush Desai and Roshni Sahoo along with two coaches Shyam Wuppuluri and Rajeev Maurya, travelled to CERN, to carry on the experiment to study certain heuristics corresponding to the interaction between magnetic field and elementary particles – particularly cosmic muons.

During their stay, their greatest take away was to work with scientists at close quarters, examine their working methodologies, performing experiment, collecting the data, computing the data, and presenting the same. Cherry on the cake was to meet the Director General Fabiola Gionatti and run her through the proposal.

After their return, the team has to continue analysing the data obtained at CERN and publish a research paper in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Bhabha Atomic Research Center along with Department of Atomic Energy on the eve of Founder’s day has also felicitated the team after their return.

This event has been widely covered in news papers and other media. Ministry of external affairs has also acknowledged the success by uploading the pictures on their website.