RUI: Commissioning, Operations, and Data Analysis of the ALICE Fast Interaction Trigger Detector for LHC Run 3

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The ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is dedicated to the study of the strongly interacting nuclear matter known as the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), which is produced in high energy collisions of heavy ions. As part of a decades-long international collaboration, ALICE has helped reveal the nature of the Universe as it was just a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. Over the past several years, the PI and her team of undergraduate students have contributed to the design, testing, and construction of an essential upgrade to ALICE, the Fast Interaction Trigger (FIT) detector. FIT will enable ALICE to efficiently select the most interesting collisions for further analysis during LHC Run 3. This award allows the PI to continue her work by helping with the installation, commissioning, and operation of the detector during its initial deployment. Together with their collaborators, the PI and her students will help commission, monitor, and analyze the detector’s performance to help ALICE explore fundamental principles of the theory of strong nuclear interactions. These results will help build a deeper understanding of the primordial composition of matter. This award will allow students to contribute to the development and deployment of cutting-edge instrumentation for high-energy nuclear physics experiments and build experience and technical skills while collaborating with renowned international scientists and engineers on one of the largest accelerator experiments ever conducted. Recruiting, retaining, and educating science, technology, engineering and mathematics students and teachers are critical to advancing scientific literacy, maintaining economic growth, and continuing scientific discoveries. Less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a hot, dense medium of quarks and gluons termed a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). The fundamental theory governing the interactions within this medium is known as Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD). There remain important open questions about several of QCD’s most important aspects, such as the parton-hadron transition, the nature of confinement, and the behavior of QCD matter at high temperature. The focus of the Heavy Ion program at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is to understand the behavior of this QGP matter at very high temperature and density. ALICE is the experiment dedicated to this study and has published nearly 300 articles detailing its findings. During the second long shutdown of the LHC for critical maintenance and luminosity upgrades, ALICE has upgraded many aspects of its instrumentation to take advantage of these improvements. In particular, the ALICE Fast Interaction Trigger detector (FIT) upgrade will provide ALICE unprecedented trigger discrimination for selecting rare events when the LHC commences its third physics run. Specifically, FIT will improve the detection of heavy-flavor hadrons, of thermal photons and low-mass di-electrons, and the characterization of jets created in the early stages of heavy ion collisions. These hard probes of the QGP will enable experimental verification of elusive QCD principles, such as asymptotic freedom, chiral symmetry restoration, and confinement. Not only will we gain a deeper understanding of the primordial composition of matter but we will develop a more complete picture of the cosmological evolution of the early universe.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.