2024-2025 Annual Report from UCSC/SCIPP QuarkNet Center

In 2024-2025 we continued outreach from the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics to regional high schools in central California and to students online. The QuarkNet Center programs were coordinated by faculty mentor Jason Nielsen and SCIPP Outreach Coordinator Laura Bakken, assisted by undergraduate intern Natalie Hultgren.

We visited the Physics class at Santa Cruz High in Fall 2024. A small group of graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty discussed particle physics and led the BAMA activity in the classroom. This activity went very well, and we followed up with another visit to Scotts Valley High in Spring 2025.

The annual Particle Physics Masterclass was held at SCIPP on Saturday, March 15, 2025 with 25 students. The students followed introductory particle physics lectures from theorists and experimentalists before using Hypatia to search for lepton and photon pairs in the ATLAS Z Path. Students attending in person participated in a lab tour and cloud chamber demonstration with researchers. The class ended with a videoconference with Fermilab.

We participated in the First Friday events at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, where we demonstrated strong lensing and particle detectors to about 100 visitors.

The other activities, including a hands-on electronics activity and an astroparticle data analysis activity, are still in development.