University of Maryland 2025 Quarknet Annual report
The LHCb group at the University of Maryland launched a new Quarknet center on Saturday, April 19, 2025 with a kickoff event. Recruitment started in March led by Ray Hodges, a high school teacher at Charles E Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, MD. He sent the attached flier to contacts in the public school systems of the Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, as well as to the Association of Independent Maryland & DC Schools. A total of six high school teachers attended.
The kickoff event had three talks given by the three UMD faculty members (Manuel Franco Sevilla, Hassan Jawahery, Phoebe Hamilton) that provided introductions to particle physics, UMD, and LHCb. We also had two activities from the Data Analysis Portfolio (DAP) and a lab tour. The teachers were enthusiastic about the event and expressed interest in coming back.
We then organized a two-day workshop on August 11 and 12. Recruiting was again coordinated by Ray Hodges in May-June. Up to 10 teachers expressed interest, but three did not end up following up. We also learned that mid-August is too late for some teachers who already have started their class preparation by then. Next year we will host the workshop in late July.
The theme of the workshop was invariant mass reconstruction, and included an introduction to special relativity, the LHCb masterclass, and two python activities where the teachers ended reconstructing J/ψ → μμ events from LHCb data. The activities were led by our students and postdoc. One of the activities in the LHCb masterclass involved clicking on LHCb tracks, and the software was not up to par.
We also had Prof. Peter Shawhan from UMD give a talk on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), did a tour of UMD's nuclear reactor, irradiator, and linear accelerator, and discussed careers in basic science. The workshop wrapped up with a discussion of class implementation of the activities of the workshop. We worried that the python activities could end up being too challenging, but the teachers really appreciated them (especially the individualized tutoring) and planned to use pieces of those in their classroom.