Dear Year 12 Physicists Please find below details of the essay titles for the CERN Particle School 2015, which will be due, via email to me, by 11:00am on Tuesday 9th December. The course runs at CERN in Geneva from 24th to 28th August 2015. Three JAGS girls will be chosen, together with three boys from Dulwich College, and twelve students from other selected schools in the UK. Details of the trip will be sent to your parents in the next few days and clearly this might influence whether you will be able to enter and attend, but it would be useful to start thinking about the essay competition at this stage. There's only three weeks to research and write your piece! Details from Professor Bowcock of CERN: "Write a short essay of less than 800 words on ONE of the topics listed below. Where you have made use of text-books, journals or the internet for material these must be referenced. Do not hesitate to use diagrams (and mention their sources) if it will help clarify a point to the reader. The topics are of current interest to physicists at CERN but you do not have to make your talk CERN-centric! Whatever topic you do chose ensure you introduce the basic concepts you use as if explaining to someone with little scientific background.. Essay titles: 1. What is Supersymmetry? 2. Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry in the Universe 3. Dark Energy and Dark Matter 4. What, other than size, makes the LHC different from previous accelerator experiments around the world 5. How are proton beams used in non-LHC experiments at CERN? 6. How is the design of LHCb better suited to the study of B Meson decays than a general purpose detector ? 7. What new physics can LHCb directly or indirectly detect, and how? 8. For what physics goals is it important to have ~360 degree general purpose detectors like CMS and ATLAS? 9. Cosmology is the study of the universe at a macroscopic scale whilst particle physics is concerned with the smallest scales imaginable. How can cosmologists work with particle physicists? 10. Why is the Higgs Boson important to particle physicists? Our advice: The skill is to keep the essay concise, yet with clarity and substance, and with attention paid to the designated audience as stated above. Essays selected in the past were those that used all 800 words but not more. One was rejected since it was overly mathematical and ultimately ended up a little confused and another was too brief and consequently did not provide sufficient depth. Professor Bowcock also ran the essays through the plagiarism software they use at the university, so own words and careful, in-line referencing are essential. Good luck Mr Hicklenton.