Update - 22 January 2022
Our Innovation Centres remain operational and accessible, and provide a safe environment for our staff and customers. We continue to assess the risk of COVID-19 alongside the latest guidance from government. In the meantime our Innovation Centre remains COVID-19 Secure and fully open for business. Our detailed risk assessment can be found here.
ATOM Festival: Harwell Campus Open Day
March 20 @ 11:00 am - 2:00 pm
Event Navigation
Guided Heritage Trail
A guided heritage trail that brings to life the remarkable history of Harwell From wartime beginnings to its role at the forefront of innovation, this walk explores the people, places and moments that have shaped the site over the decades.
Date: Friday 20th March
Time: 11:00 – 12:00 (approx. 1 hour)
Parking: Thomson Avenue Car Park
Meeting point: Lightbox Café, Harwell Campus (approx. 2-min walk from car park)
Cost: Adult £3 (19+), Child £2 (under 18)
RAL Particle Physics Tour
Join us for an exclusive tour of the Particle Physics Department Exhibition Room at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory during the Atom Festival. Discover what we do at the forefront of particle physics research and learn about the building blocks of matter – elementary particles – and how we detect them.
Date: Friday 20th March
Time: 12:45 – 13:45 (approx. 1 hour)
Parking: Lumen House Car Park
Meeting point: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Reception (approx. 10-min walk from car park, here)
Cost: Adult £3 (19+), Child £2 (under 18)
Our exhibition features 34 fascinating exhibits, including retired silicon strip and pixel detectors, trigger front-end boards, calorimeters, and scale models of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN. You’ll gain insights into the three major detectors at the Large Hadron Collider—ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb—as well as groundbreaking experiments like Super-Kamiokande for neutrinos, ZEPLIN I and II for dark matter at Boulby, and the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment at ISIS.
The tour also includes a look at the ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITK) clean room from the outside and showcases advanced detector technologies that power modern particle physics. Whether you’re curious about the universe’s smallest components or the technology behind world-class experiments, this is your chance to see science in action!
