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“I think art is what makes us human,” says Dr. Clara Nellist, a particle physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. “Pure scientific curiosity … I compare it to art.”
It’s this human curiosity, this pursuit of art, that drives Dr. Nellist, who helped develop the pixel detector for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC.) In her everyday work, she doesn’t see a demarcation line between art and science. Trying to understand the world around you, just for the sake of understanding it, is art.
“One of the oldest questions is just, ‘What is this made of?’” she says. “You can kind of say that the [Large Hadron Collider] is a giant microscope. We’re going down to the very smallest things that could possibly make up the building blocks of the universe.” The science that Dr. Nellist has dedicated her life and career to aims to answer these fundamental questions.
It Doesn’t Have to Be Art Versus Science
“Honestly, at school, I didn’t really know what physics was,” Dr. Nellist says, with a laugh. “It’s a bit embarrassing.” At her schools growing up, the teachers were excellent but didn’t have many resources. ”We had a science teacher, and they were enthusiastic, but I knew biology was plants and chemistry was chemicals, and physics was the other one that involved like pushing things down ramps.” But eventually, when it came time for her A levels, Dr. Nellist decided she wanted to do physics. There was just one problem: Her school didn’t offer it.
Her mother, a primary school teacher, encouraged young Clara to pursue physics, even if it made things a bit more difficult. “I registered to do physics at a different school and went there for lessons twice a week. I enjoyed it, but honestly my best grade was English, not physics,” she says. “Physics I found challenging, but in a really good way.”
Dr. Nellist’s parents also influenced her in other significant ways: “I grew up with parents who were very vocal about things that weren’t good. I learned from them that we have to try to stand up and change things,” she explains. It’s why she speaks out about diversity and inclusivity in STEM fields and is inspired by those around her. “I’m very grateful also to the people that have made a difference before me and that are continuing to make a difference now, because they also give me the strength to speak up.”
When it came time for university, Dr. Nellist was still struggling between physics and English, but she eventually decided on physics. Her favorite thing about English was reading books, which she could do at home. “But for physics, no one was going to let me build a lab in my house,” she says.
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At the University of Manchester, she was immediately drawn to astrophysics. Still, her school had a big, high-energy physics department, and as part of her master’s program, they gave her the opportunity to work at Fermilab in Chicago, Illinois. “I got to work with international scientists,” she says. “I got to work on actual current research. Once I started doing that, I was hooked.”
That’s how Dr. Nellist became a particle physicist, receiving her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2013. And it’s how she came to work on the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
Breaking Open Particles at CERN
CERN, which was established in 1964, operates the world’s largest particle accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is a 27-km long particle accelerator that smashes mostly protons at near-light speed. The end goal? To help scientists answer some of the biggest, and most fundamental, questions about the universe around us: What is the origin of mass? What is the nature of dark matter? Why isn’t there more antimatter?
“We collide these particles together because it allows us to create particles that exist in our universe but don’t last for very long and we otherwise can’t study in a controlled environment,” Dr. Nellist explains. “And we can reconstruct what happens in these collisions to understand what was created at the very heart of the collision—it could be a Higgs Boson, it could be dark matter, we don’t know.” Studying these collisions in extreme detail is what allows CERN’s scientists to build a picture of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.
But the detector is more complicated than you might think. “The detector is made up of many different layers,” she explains. “We often describe it as an onion.” At the center, there’s a tracker that tracks the particles passing through it. Then the calorimeter measures the energy that the particle loses as it travels, often by stopping the particles, and the particle-identification detectors identify particles, usually by measuring their mass.
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It’s at the first layer, the heart of the detector, that Dr. Nellist’s pixel detector, which is part of the ATLAS experiment at CERN, comes in. “The pixel detector is the very first layer that the particles pass through, the very first detecting layer, and so it has to be incredibly precise in terms of the space where we're measuring where these particles have gone.”
This is one place where the absolute success of the Large Hadron Collider works against scientists—the number of particles passing through the detector is extremely high, but each of these particles causes damage to the detector. “We have a friendly competition that the better the accelerator operates, the more quickly our detectors degrade. And so we have to design newer versions that can handle the increased radiation damage.” It’s a constant process of designing and upgrading for both robustness and sensitivity. “What we want to do is make the most robust design that is also still operating very quickly and very precisely,” she explains.
She hasn’t forgotten her love of English though, and she still uses her talent for language through her science communication work. She’s especially known for her videos on TikTok and Instagram. “Science communication is a way to make sure other people get to be exposed to the kind of work we're doing and get to ask questions and not be made to feel silly about it,” she explains. “Because everybody started from somewhere where they didn't know what was going on.”
“I had opportunities because of my parents and that kind of thing,” she continues. “I want to be able to give other people the opportunity to find out what we’re doing.”
Why This Kind of Work Matters
At this point in her career, Dr. Nellist’s work has shifted more toward data analysis than building detectors—she now studies top quarks. “Despite being discovered in 1995, there’s still a lot we’re learning about them, and they might be able to help us understand what dark matter is.” She is also an assistant professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam.
Her enthusiasm for her work is palpable. “What I really love about the work that we're doing is that there are many, many technological advancements that come from it,” she says. “We’re not planning on them at the beginning. It’s just the fact that when you put thousands of people together who are curious and want to design the best detectors or accelerators or ways of processing the data, then a bunch of new advancements come along. And because it’s CERN, we don’t patent anything. It’s not designed to make money. We just publish it.”
From medical technology to communications advancements to the internet as we know it, it’s virtually impossible to list every single invention and innovation that has come from CERN or the organization’s data.
“I love the fact that even though I’m not working specifically on that, I get to feed into and support innovation that is going to help people live better lives.”
