PHYSICS students in Year 12 and 13 at Okehampton College have been lucky enough to visit the largest scientific experiment on Earth — the Large Hadron Collider. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, runs the world's largest particle physics laboratory. Straddling the border between Switzerland and France at Geneva, CERN's facility includes the 27 kilometre circular particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider. A group of 19 students and two members of staff made the trip to Geneva for a two day trip involving a tour of CERN and some of the research it is carrying out. The facility is hosting experimental work to confirm the scientific theories regarding the fundamental particles that make up matter. The most famous achievement of the LHC has been the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, originally theorised in 1964 but discovered at CERN 48 years later on July 4, 2012. The find is pivotal to the Standard Model and other theories within particle physics. The students' tour began with a lecture regarding the groundbreaking work being carried out, before a trip to the control centre of AMS-02 detector, a particle detector attached to the International Space Station. A trip to a detector in the LHC itself followed. Dr Rob Kelly, the teacher that organised the trip, said: 'It is a huge project in every sense, with some 4,300 scientists from 42 countries involved in the collaboration and we were lucky enough to be able to see right inside the detector as it was opened up for maintenance during our visit. 'I think it's fair to say that all of us on the trip were blown away by the scale of the experiments at CERN and what can be achieved when a group of physicists work together towards a common goal. 'The outcome is truly staggering, and it is our hope in the science faculty that our physics students will have been inspired to believe that even the most challenging of goals are achievable with a little inspiration, followed by a lot of hard work and collaboration.'