A level students, Lucy Butler and Hitham Hassan, like to scratch below the surface in their pursuit of knowledge. This time, the SRC Bede Sixth Form students, took the advice literally as they explored the power of X-rays.

The A level physics students visited Grace Dental Practice in Billingham as part of a national project. Local Dentist, Rekha Handa, helped them to X-ray a specialist particle detector developed at the home of the Large Hadron Collider by scientists at CERN.

The detector was recently used during the partial eclipse of the sun as part of a national survey to see if there was a decrease in background radiation during this event. The instrument has even been flown to the International Space Station as part of their research.

Head of physics at SRC Bede Sixth Form, Bernard Taylor, oversaw the project at Bede. He explained that SRC Bede Sixth Form was one of only about a dozen schools and colleges in the country to be lent the detector as part of the ‘CERN@school’ project and said that students were still analysing the results.

Bernard added “It is very kind of Rekha to let us use her surgery and X-ray machine and students have had further insights into how physics is used in the everyday world”.

To find out more about how you can study physics at SRC Bede Sixth Form, call 01642 373250 or email info@stockton.ac.uk