ISEF 2024 — Physics Grand Award, First Place

A student I worked with took first place in the Physics and Astronomy category at ISEF 2024. The project was theoretical — no lab bench, no sensor arrays, no dataset downloads. Just physics. It was a model of charm quark hadronization in the context of high-energy phenomenology, and what follows is an account of how it came to be, what the judges saw in it, and what I think other students can learn from it.

The physics — briefly

Charm quarks are produced abundantly in high-energy collisions at particle accelerators. After production, a charm quark cannot travel freely — it undergoes hadronization, binding with other quarks into composite particles called hadrons. The mechanism of this transition is not fully described by perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD); it sits in the non-perturbative regime where the coupling constant is large and standard expansion methods break down. Modelling it requires both theoretical framework choices and numerical fitting to experimental data.

The project constructed a model for the hadronization process specifically for charm quarks, drawing on the Lund string model as a conceptual basis while adapting the fragmentation function parameters to match LHC-era charm meson production data. The result was a set of predictions for D-meson momentum spectra that matched experimental measurements at CERN with accuracy competitive with existing published models — produced entirely by a high school student working without institutional affiliation.

How the project began

The starting point was not "I want to win ISEF." It was curiosity about why certain physics competitions asked questions about the Standard Model that could be answered from a textbook, while the actual frontier — where the model breaks down, where approximations fail — was never touched. That curiosity drove the student toward QCD, toward the specific sub-problem of non-perturbative effects, and eventually toward a research question narrow enough to be tractable.

The mentor relationship mattered. The student worked with a physicist at a research institution who pointed toward relevant literature and provided a sounding board for whether physical intuitions were sound. But the intellectual decisions — which model framework to use, which parameters to fit, how to frame the comparison with experimental data — were the student's own. This distinction became critical at ISEF, where judges probe exactly this question.

What the judging looked like

ISEF physics judges include working physicists from research institutions and universities. They are not generalists assessing whether a project is "impressive for a high school student." They are domain experts reading a research proposal and evaluating it against their knowledge of the current state of the field.

In the first judging session, the student presented for about eight minutes, then received questions for the remaining seven. The questions reached into the theory: Why the Lund model and not an alternative fragmentation scheme? How were the fragmentation function parameters constrained — were there degeneracies in the fit? What does the model predict for B-meson production, and does that prediction hold? These are not questions from a general science fair rubric. They are questions a postdoc would receive at a group meeting.

The student answered them. Not perfectly — there were places where "I haven't tested that yet" was the honest answer — but with sufficient depth and intellectual honesty to demonstrate genuine ownership of the work.

What made it first place

Three things, in my assessment, separated this project from the other strong submissions in the category.

• The question was original. The specific problem — charm quark hadronization modelled at this level of detail by a high school student — had not been done before. Judges recognize novelty immediately, because they know the literature.
• The theory was self-consistent. The model was not assembled from mismatched pieces. The student understood the framework well enough to know what assumptions it made, and the write-up made those assumptions explicit rather than hidden.
• The student could defend every choice. Every parameter, every approximation, every comparison to data had a reason behind it that the student could articulate. Not because they had memorised answers, but because they had built the model and therefore understood what it was doing.

For students considering theoretical physics projects

The barrier to this kind of work is not intelligence — it is exposure. Most students preparing for ISEF have never seen a QFT textbook or a Monte Carlo event generator. That is not a failure of the students; it is a failure of the preparation pipeline. Students who want to do theoretical physics research need to start with that literature earlier than feels comfortable, accept that confusion is the normal state, and find mentors who will recommend specific papers rather than general textbooks.

The other thing worth saying: theoretical projects are genuinely harder to evaluate at the regional level, because regional judges often do not have the domain background to assess the quality of the theory. A weaker theoretical project can sometimes win a regional while a stronger experimental project loses. At ISEF, this reverses — the domain specialists are there and they will find the depth or the lack of it. Students should calibrate accordingly.

The project was unusual because it was genuinely theoretical and genuinely rigorous. That combination is rare at any level of science fair.