Rice/UH QuarkNet Annual Report 2025

Rice/UH QuarkNet Annual Report 2025

The Rice/UH QuarkNet center is happy to report another year of great interest from the local high schools in our two main annual events, both successfully executed in the first half of 2025. We continue to see the positive, long-term impact of outreach efforts such as the Physics Education Forum we hosted in December 2023 and discussed in our past annual report. In between the two events in 2025, the Rice CMS group hosted the US-CMS Collaboration meeting on campus. About a hundred US particle physicists attended, and we took advantage of such a great audience to highlight all that QuarkNet contributes in terms of student and teacher education. Shane Woods gave a great online presentation on all these QuarkNet efforts, and our visitor Isabela Maietto Silverio shared her experience from her Masterclasses back at her institute in São Paulo (and this year at Rice!).

2025 Masterclass: Data Analysis and Muon Detection

On Saturday, March 29, we organized a Masterclass for high school students. Students and their teachers joined us for a day of lectures and intensive, hands-on opportunities to analyze actual data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), held primarily in one of our state-of-the-art computer labs. 

We provided a comprehensive campus experience focused on muons, the M in the middle of CMS, and the detection of such particles. Of course, there is much more, and we were especially excited to have Rice’s Physics On Parade entertain the students with many fantastic physics demos during the department-provided lunch. Before that, students had seen a setup in the advanced undergraduate student lab used to detect and measure the lifetime of muons. Additionally, a low-tech Cloud Chamber provided plenty of opportunities for the students to use their smartphones to record many spectacular particle tracks from a range of particles that freely roam around our daily lives! A lot of excitement (and electrons!) was generated by switching on an old Cathode Ray Tube next to the cloud chamber. At the end of the day, the Rice students joined a video conference with Fermilab to discuss the findings of their CMS analyses.

2025 High School Teacher Summer Workshop: Coding, Quantum, and Cosmic Watches!
The annual High School Teacher Summer Workshop, held from June 9 - 13, 2025, once more provided an excellent, week-long professional development opportunity. We are particularly grateful to our friends at IRIS-HEP for including a 2-day hands-on coding session. Of course, there was an obvious, central theme in the Year of Quantum Physics. QuarkNet’s Quantum Data Workshop perfectly fitted this and resulted in many engaged discussions on basic quantum concepts. Finally, a workshop featuring the newest kid on the block, the Cosmic Watch, allowed teachers to revist some of the topics we traditionally discuss in the context of the CRDs that some of the Rice/UH QuarkNet centers have in their classrooms, and go a few steps further by measuring radiation originating from smashed bananas or “no-salt” jars from the local grocery store.

Following our well-tried format, we combined these smaller workshops with exciting lectures from Rice and UH faculty covering cutting-edge developments in physics research and teaching

• "Asking the Right Questions: Random, and Chaotic Motions, Patterns & Networks" (Prof. Gemunu Gunaratne, UH)
• "Probing the Nature's Primordial Fluid" (Prof. Volodymir Vovchenko, UH)
• "Emergent Physics and Phase Transitions" (Prof. Doug Natelson, Rice Univ.)
• “Introductory Physics at Rice University” (Prof. Robert Beaird (Rice Univ.)
• "Diving Deeper with the James Webb Telescope" (Prof. Megan Reiter, Rice Univ.)

The department provided all attendees with daily lunches (and coffee!) during which time they could further quiz the speakers on their work. Our workshop concluded on Friday with a locally organized event that involved a live tour of the CMS experiment at CERN, thanks to our students who are located at CERN and the CMS Outreach team. The YouTube video can be found at this link: https://youtu.be/alw_7z5nwME