More than 500 junior and senior high-schoolers from seven different locations in Greece had the opportunity for a virtual visit to the CMS experiment today in collaboration with the Open Discovery Space project. W. With the use of lightweight technology, senior engineer Andromachi Tsirou offered students a unique tour of the CMS detector, located 100m underground on the French side of the LHC. At the same time, Antonis Agapitos and Nikos Chrysogelos, junior members of the CMS collaboration, were answering students’ questions live online from the CMS control room. And with the help of ATLAS Outreach co-cordinator, Christine Kourkoumelis joining the virtual tour, students got the bigger picture of the role of CMS and ATLAS experiments in the Higgs particle discovery. 

"I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Andromachi at the heart of the CMS detector zooming in the inner tracker; simply amazing," says Angelos Alexopoulos of CERN’s Education Group who coordinated today’s virtual tour with the help of Kourkoumelis. "The messages we got from the local organizers at all seven schools just after the tour gave us confidence that we could expand on this by organizing similar national-level events in the future for inspiring even a bigger number of young people around the world," he says. 

Tsirou offers the virtual visitors a close-up of the inner tracking system of CMS (Image: Noemi Beni/CERN)

The Greek high schools that took part in today's visit were: 3rd Junior High Schol of Alexandroupolis, 4th High School of Volos, 52nd Junior High School of Athens, Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Experimental Junior High School of Patras, Giannopoulos High School, Junior High School of Platanias.

Try it yourself! ATLAS also organises virtual tours, or you can explore the CERN campus and accelerators on Google Street View.