Honours student Matt LeBlanc has won the Canadian Institute of Particle Physics(IPP)/CERN summer student competition and received one of four awards to spend two months at CERN this summer. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the home of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.

According to Dr. William Trischuk, a Director of the IPP, the pool of applicants this year was “extraordinarily competitive”.

The Subatomic physics research group in Canada include 31 universities as well as TRIUMF, SNOLab, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Acadia was added to the list in 2004, when Dr. Svetlana Barkanova, a subatomic theorist, joined the Acadia faculty.

Matt is the third Acadia student to do research at a major international subatomic physics facility. Don Jones did research at Jefferson Laboratory in Virginia in the summer of 2007 and Katy Hally spent the summer of 2008 at  TRIUMF in Vancouver. 

With the Large Hadron Collider starting to take data this year, CERN is the certainly place to be at the moment. The LHC, built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference, is designed to collide two counter rotating beams of protons at 14TeV. These energies permit searching for signatures of supersymmetry, dark matter and the origins of mass.

The IPP will provide Matt with a round-trip flight from Canada to Geneva and a stipend that will cover his expenses in Europe. Matt’s work will culminate with an Honour thesis written at Acadia.