Student FCC Workshop at MIT – v3 2025

It is the third year we are making January a very busy month for undergraduate students here at MIT and at other places to learn and contribute to the planned FCC project. What started in Fall 2022 as a vague idea of a PR project for the Future Circular Collider study turned into a real research project for eight undergraduate MIT students in High Energy Physics when January 2023 rolled around… and it continued into Spring with a glorious road trip to Brookhaven National Lab to participate in the 1st US FCC Workshop, and five of those students continued with a research internship at CERN with the group that summer. Inspired by the success of the project we expanded the scope in January 2024 and included remote students from Purdue and Maryland with their respective advisors and the lectures becoming a little more organized, still mostly just impromptus on the white board in CPs office. In January 2024 a road trip was not necessary for the MIT students because the 2nd US FCC Workshop took place at MIT but students from Maryland and Purdue came and it was a wonderful and very successful event. Again five students stayed on for the summer to participate in CERN based research that year.

This year we took another leap… we expanded the coordination team including Eluned Smith and her postdoc Anja Beck. This brought about an increase of students and a broadening of the scope of projects now also including a substantial addition of heavy flavor physics and a much more professionally executed set of lectures. Eluned and CP shared the load:” there is a full schedule on indico and because we have again remote participants we recorded the lectures and upload them as we go along. We are excited about the conference at the end and hope we can get a few students to join us again for the summer research at CERN.

Coordination dinner for the FCC in January at MIT – no students here

In addition to the base team of Eluned, Jan, Anja and CP we had several other helpers join in for January fun. David Walter, our new postdoc came to take over for Jan after the first two weeks and Dolores Garcia a fresh addition from CERN joined for work on the machine learning aspects of the project. Loukas Gouskos from Brown and Benedikt Maier from Imperial also showed up for some time which gave the project a lot of help and we hope to guide the students to eventually publish some of our studies. The US FCC workshop is this year in the Chicagoland area, shared between Fermilab and Argonne National Lab. We will send a number of the students to give presentations during that week; unfortunately the distant is a little too far to go on a road trip.

Important to remember for next year is that we should look into registering this event as a proper MIT class for 2025. This is actually quite some work to run.

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