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By Hamish Johnston
On 7 August five of the world’s leading accelerator labs opened their doors to amateur photographers in an event called the Particle Physics Photowalk.
The participating labs were CERN in Switzerland, DESY in Germany (pictured top right), Fermilab in the US, KEK in Japan and TRIUMF in Canada (bottom right).
The photographers were then invited to submit their best photographs and each lab selected three works to submit to the public.
You can vote for your favourite photos here.
The winner will be announced after the voting closes on 8 October.
Which photo is my favourite?
I’m torn between Ali Lambert’s arrangement of paper clips standing up on what must be a very powerful magnet, and Hans-Peter Hildebrandt’s study of…well, I’m not sure what it is but it looks very nice!
I voted for number 9 – this was my favourite and I think speaks for itself. My second favourite was number 6, which is attractive as an abstract image, but at the same time feels very familiar from looking up during long weeks spent at accelerators, or “on beam time” as the saying goes. For my third and final vote I went for number 1; this image didn’t appeal to me at first, but after looking through all the options I felt that it best captured the grubby, messy nature of this sort of place, filled with multicoloured wires, metal, and with objects scattered haphazardly on the floor.