Berkeley, Richmond, and Pinole Valley High School students were given a guided tour of the Magnet Assembly Area in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on November 6, 2024. The visit was part of the High School STEM Days, a monthly event that allows students and teachers to tour Berkeley Lab, network with Lab employees, and participate in job shadowing. The ultimate goal of STEM Day is to increase the number of K-12 summer program applicants from local school districts. The program manages two Office of Science’s Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) Pathway Summer Science Programs focusing on quantum technologies, machine learning, and data science.
The STEM Day aims to “introduce local high school students to different types of STEM research and STEM-related careers that they might not have been aware of,” says Special Programs and Volunteer Manager Elina Dluger Rios, who works on the K-12 STEM Education Programs as part of the Office of Government and Community Relations at the Lab. “One of the day’s highlights was seeing how engaged students were and how comfortable they felt asking questions. One of the things we do for these visits is to create a theme, which helps choose specific cohorts to come to the lab.”
Dluger Rios adds that this helped “tremendously, as the students were already interested in Engineering, machine shops, and physics and, therefore, had a more solid understanding of the concepts being conveyed by the scientists.”
During the visit, over 60 students and four teachers learned how scientists at the Lab assemble superconducting magnets and how their work contributes to the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Accelerator Upgrade Project, which aims to increase the luminosity of the LHC, the world’s most powerful particle collider.
Jose Luis Rudeiros Fernandez demonstrates how superconducting magnets are assembled.
Jose Luis Rudeiros Fernandez, a research scientist in ATAP’s Superconducting Magnet Program (SMP), introduced the students to particle accelerators and superconductivity and how they are used to study nature on a fundamental level.
“After showing them the important contributions of Berkeley Lab to projects like the high-luminosity upgrade to the LHC, the students were engaged and asked insightful questions about how superconducting magnets work,” he says.
SMP Research Scientist Jean-Francois Croteau guided the students around the Rutherford cabling facility, where superconducting wires are made into cables for the magnets. He says, “After demonstrating these wires’ complex and intricate microstructure and how it takes multiple wires to make a cable, we moved on to the magnet assembly facility to show them how coils are assembled to make a magnet.”
Jean-Francois Croteau sows students around the Rutherford cabling facility, where superconducting wires are made into cables for the magnets.
Other ATAP staff participating in STEM Day included Deputy Division Director for Operations Asmita Patel; Senior Scientist and Deputy Head of SMP Paolo Ferrcain; and IDEA, Outreach & Education Coordinator Ina Reichel.
“Thanks to the ATAP team for showing students the magnet test facility and explaining what they were doing, how the magnets worked, and how their work was relevant to National Lab research,” said Dluger Rios.
Wareham Development and the Office of Science’s WDTS Pathway Summer Science Programs fund High School STEM Days.
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