Oklahoma QuarkNet - Annual Report 2024

Once again, Oklahoma State University (OSU) and the University of Oklahoma (OU) joined forces for a lively summer QuarkNet Teacher Workshop. This year’s workshop was hosted at OSU from July 29 to July 31 (https://quarknet.org/document/relativity-workshop-osu-2024).

The focus of this year’s workshop was Einstein’s theory of Relativity and we had nine teachers participate in the event. On Monday and Tuesday, QuarkNet Fellow Jeremy Wegner led the Special Relativity lab. On Wednesday, Joe led activities on curved space-time and General Relativity.  The workshop also included a talk by John about searches for exotic Long Lived Particles at the LHC, which heavily rely on Special Relativity, as well as two excellent lectures by guest speaker Dr. Tau Xu about Black Holes and Gravitational Waves that provided participants with a deeper understanding of these predictions of General Relativity.

In addition to the summer workshop, OSU hosted two ATLAS Masterclasses in 2024, engaging around 20 high-school students from three schools in Oklahoma. These students learned about particle physics and participated in hands-on activities, analyzing real data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN and presenting their findings in a video conference with Fermilab.

We had another great year and are thankful to the NSF for funding this program. Teachers and students in Oklahoma do not have much exposure to basic research, and QuarkNet has been one of our most successful tools for getting high school students engaged in and excited about physics. We look forward to next year, with the summer workshop back at OU for 2025.