This past spring MIT physics PhD student Manu Srivastava opened an email from a group of Indian high‑schoolers who wanted to enter Beamline for Schools—an international competition that lets secondary students design and run experiments with particle‑accelerator beams—and were looking for a mentor. Srivastava, a quantum‑gravity researcher in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics (Leinweber Institute) under Prof. Hong Liu, usually declines such requests, but the sincerity of the message convinced him to help.
After months of back‑and‑forth emails and calls, the students secured a trip to CERN in Geneva, spending two weeks turning their idea into a real experiment. The six students, calling themselves Team attoPION, were one of five teams selected from a record 712 entries (representing 89 countries and over 4,500 students) for the 13th annual Beamline for Schools competition.
When they first met Srivastava, the team already had several experimental concepts. His role was to filter out the ideas that were both practical and scientifically interesting. They settled on measuring a pion charge‑exchange reaction: a positively charged pion $\pi^{+}$ interacts with a neutron $n$ in a target, producing a neutral pion $\pi^{0}$ and a positively charged proton $p$, i.e. $\pi^{+}+n\rightarrow\pi^{0}+p$. The goal is to quantify how often this reaction occurs.
Srivastava suspected that such a measurement could be relevant to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). DUNE co‑spokesperson Dave Newbold explained that understanding pion‑matter interactions helps reduce uncertainties in DUNE’s measurements, especially for determining neutrino flavor and energy. If successful, the result could even be publishable.
At CERN the students worked hands‑on with detectors and data‑acquisition systems, collected and analyzed data, and attended talks by CERN scientists. In preparation they collaborated with Beamline for Schools support scientist Berare Göktürk, who warned that the charge‑exchange process is extremely rare, forcing the team to devise a reliable detection strategy. With only 12 days of test‑beam time, Göktürk emphasized staying humble about the limitations while encouraging the students to “understand the journey of a scientist.”
For Srivastava, mentoring pushed him far beyond his theoretical‑physics comfort zone. MIT’s culture of interdisciplinary seminars and colloquia encouraged him to explore questions outside his own research. Growing up in India, he sees this mentorship as a way to inspire young people there to pursue fundamental science. “I didn’t even know what CERN was in high school,” he says. “But these students are that good. They deserve all the credit.”
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