Year of physics at Subatech

The French Ministry of Education and Youth, the CEA, the CNRS, France Universités and the Société Française de Physique are dedicating the 2023-2024 school year to physics as part of a scientific mediation operation aimed at schools and the general public.
We took part in the Year of Physics by organizing a training day on Friday, January 12, for 53 middle and high school teachers from the Pays de la Loire region, to help them discover and share advances in our research.
Christophe Lerouge, Director of IMT Atlantique, followed by Ginés Martinez, Director of Subatech, opened the day. This was followed by presentations by SUBATECH's teacher-researchers to a very attentive audience of teachers. The morning ended with a presentation of the MERITE project, supported by the DELMA department.
The afternoon was reserved for group workshops and physics experiments. Teachers showed great interest in the KM3NeT (Cubic KiloMetre Neutrino Telescope) and XEMIS projects, which aim to develop a liquid xenon Compton camera for medical imaging. They also discovered the Wilson fog chamber, which can be used to highlight cosmic radiation. They were able to handle a case from the MERITE project. Finally, they were given a demonstration of the radioactivity present all around us, in everyday objects.

Ginès Martinez: "It was an honor to organize this day dedicated to secondary school teachers, to give them an insight into our research ecosystem. Physics, and in particular subatomic physics, is still the subject of intense research at the Subatech laboratory, both fundamental and directed in the fields of energy, environment and health. I'm proud of the quality of the presentations and workshops, which enabled us to share our advances in subatomic physics and its associated technologies with high school teachers and colleagues from the Pays de la Loire region."