The HBCU COLLIDER Collaboration's goal is to provide resources for HBCU nuclear and particle physics faculty to further the broader goals of their collective institutional missions through research. The members of the COLLIDER Collaboration are Florida A&M University (FAMU), Howard University (HU), and Texas Southern University (TSU). Each institution's mission has a core commitment to increasing opportunities for underserved populations. Both FAMU and HU have graduate physics programs and, through this project, will lay a foundation for broader participation of HBCUs and their underserved communities in planned major national investments in experimental nuclear physics at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), Jefferson Lab and the proposed Electron Ion Collider (EIC).
There are two related objectives for this project. 1) The proposed research project involves the measurement of Ultra-peripheral J/Psi cross sections in heavy ion collisions with the PHENIX detector at RHIC. 2) In addition, the project seeks to build a cosmic ray test stand to test multi gap Resistive Plate Chambers, a technology that can be used for 10 picosecond level time of flight measurements in modern nuclear and particle physics experiments. Such an advance will greatly enhance the particle identification capabilities of collider detectors, enabling more knowledge about the fundamental laws of physics to be extracted from these collisions.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
