On February 12, 2025, students from Berkeley, Latitude, Antioch, and Richmond High Schools participated in a guided tour of the Magnet Assembly Area in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The visit was part of Berkeley Lab’s High School STEM Days, a monthly event for public high school students to visit the Lab focusing on particle accelerator science and engineering and their applications.
Berkeley Lab’s K-12 STEM Education & Outreach Program hosted the event in partnership with ATAP’s Asmita Patel, the Lab’s Engineering Division’s Rebecca Carney, and the Lab’s African American Employee Resource Group (AAERG)’s Stacy Curry.
“The primary goal of High School STEM Days is to share what life is like in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and STEM-adjacent professions and learn more about summer programs and high school internships for students at Berkeley Lab,” says Dluger Rios, a special programs and volunteer training coordinator in the K-12 STEM Education & Outreach Program. “It’s a chance for students and school representatives to tour Berkeley Lab, network with Lab employees, and participate in job shadowing.”
Dluger Rios adds that High School STEM Days also aim to increase the number of K-12 summer program applicants from local school districts. The program manages two Office of Science’s Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) Pathway Summer Science Programs, focusing on quantum technologies, machine learning, and data science.
During a packed day, 88 students and eight teachers were given four guided tours of the ALS and six tours of ATAP’s Magnet Test Facility. They also participated in a Berkeley Lab Engineering Division Showcase and attended a live Black History Month speaker series talk.
“The students and teachers were very engaged,” says Dluger Rios. “They asked insightful questions and were very interested in how things worked and how they related to the research conducted at the Lab. They were also interested in what it was like to have a job at the Lab, asking specific questions about pay, benefits, schooling required, and courses taken at school.”
ATAP’s Outreach and Communications Specialist, Ina Reichel, and Engineering’s Mechanical Engineer, Daniel Schow, conducted the ALS tours, a user facility supported by the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Program, serves nearly 1,700 users annually in the physical and life sciences, where the students learned how researchers use its 40 beams for a wide range of discovery science topics. It also allowed students to see the engineering that goes into an accelerator facility, how to interpret load-bearing simulations, and how these simulations are helping our researchers design and build new support structures for a major upgrade to the ALS (ALS-U).
“They also saw some of the dipole magnets awaiting installation in the accumulator ring as part of ALS-U and got a quick look into the accelerator tunnel,” says Reichel, “and asked some great questions beyond the usual “What’s with all the foil?” (Aluminum foil, a ubiquitous and often remarked upon feature of ultrahigh-vacuum scientific apparatus, conserves heat during “bake-out.”)
During their tour of ATAP’s superconducting magnet test facility, ATAP’s Superconducting Magnet Program (SMP) Senior Scientist and Program Deputy Paolo Ferracin showed the students how particle accelerators work and their importance in fundamental scientific research. They also learned how superconducting accelerator magnets are constructed and saw a nearly-completed Berkeley Lab-built quadrupole magnet for the high-luminosity upgrade of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Other highlights included a demonstration of superconductivity and learning about the properties of liquid nitrogen, which cools the magnets to superconducting temperatures.
“We demonstrated to the students how superconducting materials repel external magnetic fields using a magnetic levitation train, which they found immensely enjoyable,” says Ferracin. “The students’ enthusiasm and interest were gratifying and clear proof of the importance of these outreach events. High school is a critical moment in a person’s educational life, so reaching out to the students at this time is essential if we want to promote STEM subjects to future generations.”
In the video above, Paolo Ferracin explains the science of superconductivity as the Engineering Divisions’ Simone Johnson pours liquid nitrogen on to the magnet, which cools it to temperatures at which it becomes superconducting.
Built by an SMP Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship student, the magnetic levitation train demonstrates the expulsion of a superconductor’s magnetic field as it cools below its critical temperature. The single car, modeled after the Lab’s shuttle buses at the time, contains three high-temperature superconducting pellets. The track includes permanent magnets, which Engineering recently refurbished. Over the years, ATAP has replaced and purchased parts required to maintain these demonstrations.
The students also heard from SMP Research Scientist Jose Luis Rudeiros Fernandez and Mechanical Engineering Associate Anjana Saravanan, who presented a talk on the applications of superconducting magnets. During presentations from Ferracin, Rudeiros Fernandez, and Saravanan and guided tours of the Magnet Test Facility and the ALS, the students learned how particle accelerators benefit society.
“They were very interested in seeing how these very complex machines help us understand nature on a fundamental level,” says Rudeiros Fernandez, adding that the students were also “impressed by the numerous applications in civil society where advancements in the field of superconductivity have benefited society as a whole.”
He noted that the students also asked many questions about superconductivity, especially after the magnet levitation train demonstration, which, he says, helped them understand the basics of superconductivity.
After the Magnet Test Facility, the students toured the Engineering Building 77 Machine Shop and met Lab employees during a career networking workshop. Over lunchtime, as part of AAERG’s 2025 Black History Month Speaker Series, K-12 STEM Education & Outreach Program Director Faith Dukes spoke to the students about her academic journey in STEM.
Following the event, a Latitude High School teacher messaged Dluger Rios, saying, “Thank you so much for an incredible day yesterday! It is truly a tour de force of planning, logistics, and immersive hands-on experiences. An absolute triumph!”
Over 40 Lab employees, including ATAP, Nuclear Science, and Engineering Division staff, volunteered to showcase their work and support the students on the day. “Several students from our STEM Days have applied to our summer internships, and we hope to see many of them return as student interns soon,” says Dluger Rios.
The organizers wish to thank other staff members who participated in STEM Day, including ATAP’s Asmita Patel and Mike Naus and the Engineering Division’s Simone Johnson, Joshua Herrera, and Anjana Saravanan. They also extend their thanks to Rebecca Carney, an engineer in the Electronics, Software, and Instrumentation Department who coordinated the Engineering Division Showcase, and Stacy Curry, chair of AAERG and a program manager in the Building Technology & Urban Systems Division, who coordinated the Black History Month speaker series talk.
To learn more …
Berkeley Lab’s February 2024 High School STEM Day focuses on Lab-wide engineering efforts
For more information on ATAP News articles, contact caw@lbl.gov.
