The 2023 Physicists Inspiring the Next Generation: Exploring the Nuclear Matter*

The 2023 cohort of the “Physicists Inspiring the Next Generation (PING): Exploring the Nuclear Matter” included twenty-four pre-college students that worked with ten undergraduate students at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams of Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. PING includes a two-week summer program and year-round research opportunity for high school and middle school students, as well as a year-round research component for undergraduate students on basic and applied nuclear physics topics. Over the Summer 2023, the students assembled and perform experiments using the Rutherford scattering experiment kit from Leybold along with comparing their measurements with a Geant4 simulation. This work is serving as a baseline for a beam monitoring and charge radii measurement of rare isotopes for the MoNA Collaboration. The work included two detector designs based on silicon (STELLA) and GEM (PHOENIX) technology. Some of the PING2022 students continued collaborating with the PING2023 undergraduate students on the development of a modular PYXIS neutron detector that is expected to complement the MoNA-LISA neutron array and recently funded next generation neutron detector, opening the possibility to extend the reconstructed decay energy to large angles and lower energy neutrons. The pre-college participants represented schools from California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. The status of this research will be presented and discussed.