At the core of a successful undergraduate education in STEM disciplines is the capacity to offer students the opportunity to practice scientific inquiry through the iteration that connects the use of modern technology and captivating areas of research. This project is centered on a research program to study Heavy Ion Collisions at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the ALICE experiment in two areas of interest: the jet physics capabilities brought to ALICE by the electromagnetic calorimeter (EMCal), and a modest R&D component to explore the enhancement of the EMCaL physics possibilities by improving ALICE's track-by-track particle identification capabilities with the construction of a very high momentum charged particle identification detector (VHMPID), and the expansion of the number of the EMCaL modules.

Recruiting, retaining, and educating science, technology, engineering and mathematics students and teachers has been identified as the cornerstone in the effort to improve scientific literacy, maintain economic growth, and to provide the platform for relevant scientific discoveries. This project addresses these issues by strengthening a recently instituted high-energy experimental nuclear physics program at CSU: (1) The use of cutting-edge technology for high-energy nuclear physics experiments provides an attractive opportunity to captivate and prepare students, (2) A collaborative program at an international laboratory exposes students to research experiences they could not otherwise obtain at an undergraduate university. Because of the make-up of our student population, the location of our university and the current outreach programs of the department, this program has the potential to promote inner-city underrepresented students into STEM education.

Project Report

CERN and the LHC The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was founded in 1954. It has become a prime example of international collaboration. It straddles the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva and is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. CERN hosts the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the experiments that detect the products of the head-on hadron and heavy ion collisions induced by the LHC. ALICE one of the main experiments at the LHC explores deep into the physics of intra-nuclear scales in order to get a glimpse of how matter behaved immediately after the Big Bang. ALICE Weighing 10 000 tons and with a height of 16 m and a length of 26 m, ALICE is a large and complex detector composed of 18 sub detectors to track and identify the tens of thousands of particles produced in each heavy-ion collision. The ALICE detector uses state-of-the-art technologies to record up to 8000 collisions per second. ALICE consists of more than 1300 collaborators from 132 physics institutes in 40 countries across the world. A wide variety of skills are needed to build and operate such a large experiment. CSU Chicago State University faculty and students play an important role in ALICE, working on with state of the art technology and performing frontier physics analysis. With the support of NSF for the last four years a total of eleven CSU students have spent their summer working at CERN. Through this project our students have performed high level research in a multicultural international environment. CSU is one of only two undergraduate institutions in ALICE, and the only institution in the collaboration serving minority students. OUTCOMES For a few millionths of a second, shortly after the big bang, the universe was filled with an astonishingly hot, dense soup made of all kinds of particles moving at near light speed. This mixture was dominated by quarks – fundamental bits of matter – and by gluons, carriers of the strong force that normally "glue" quarks together into familiar protons and neutrons and other species. In those first evanescent moments of extreme temperature, however, quarks and gluons were bound only weakly, free to move on their own in what’s called quark-gluon plasma. To recreate conditions similar to those of the Big Bang very complex machines like the LHC causes head-on collisions between massive ions, such as lead nuclei. In these heavy-ion collisions the hundreds of protons and neutrons in two such nuclei smash into one another at relativistic energies. This forms a microscopic fireball in which everything "melts" into a quark-gluon plasma. The fireball instantly cools, and the individual quarks and gluons (collectively called partons) recombine into a blizzard of ordinary matter that speeds away in all directions. The debris contains particles such as pions and kaons, which are made of a quark and an antiquark; protons and neutrons, made of three quarks; and even antiprotons, antineutrons and antineutrons which combine to form the nuclei of antiatoms as heavy as helium. Much can be learned by studying the distribution and energy of this debris, and this is the focus of the ALICE experiment. For example, an early discovery and experimental confirmation show was that the quark-gluon plasma behaves more like a perfect fluid with small viscosity than like a gas, as many researchers had expected. Another example is the evidence of the interaction of jets (a set of partons created in the collisions traveling close together) with the surrounding quark-gluon plasma (jet quenching). The ALICE collaboration has produced 70 physics publications; these papers have had an important impact in the area of high energy physics and relativistic heavy ions collisions. Our group has shared common responsibilities and duties with the rest of the collaboration. This work has contributed to the success of the experiment. Besides this work, our group has done research in two key areas heavy-ion research; We proposed the data analysis in ALICE of the topology of the jets associated with the J/psi decay, as a means to understand the production mechanisms of the J/psi prompt and to study jet quenching in Pb-Pb collisions and we also worked on the data analysis of strangeness in jet production. In the course of four years, our group at Chicago State University has involved 15 students in research. Eleven of them have spent summers at Berkeley lab, Livermore lab and CERN working on ALICE data analysis. The students have presented their contributions at national conferences. We have successfully met the objectives of our program: the integration of undergraduate research into the ALICE experiment, successful collaboration with the experiment and involvement in significant contributions to the physics program of ALICE.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Physics (PHY)
Application #
0968903
Program Officer
Bradley D. Keister
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2010-07-01
Budget End
2014-06-30
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2009
Total Cost
$336,570
Indirect Cost
Name
Chicago State University
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
chicago
State
IL
Country
United States
Zip Code
60628