At the core of a successful undergraduate education in STEM disciplines is the capacity to offer students the opportunity to practice scientific inquiry that connects the use of modern technology to captivating areas of research. This grant supports a research program to study Heavy Ion Collisions at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the ALICE experiment. The focus of the Heavy Ion program at CERN is to understand the behavior of matter at very high density, corresponding to conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when a hot, dense medium of quarks and gluons existed. The goal is to recreate these conditions via colliding nuclei at very high energies.
Chicago State University (CSU) will contribute to the ALICE effort by working on two areas of interest: the jet physics capabilities brought to ALICE by the electromagnetic calorimeter (EMCal), and R&D for the upgrade of ALICE's central barrel tracking and trigger detectors. The physics analysis of J/Psi jets detected in the EMCal that is included in the project constitutes a unique program of measurements to investigate the production mechanism of quarkonia in proton-proton collisions and the response of quark gluon medium to jet energy deposition in lead-lead collisions. On the other hand the group's R&D contribution to the upgrade of ALICE will provide opportunities for the involvement of undergraduate students in hardware projects.
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 consolidating a 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 the student population, the location of the university and the current outreach programs of the department, this program has the potential to promote inner-city underrepresented students into STEM education.
