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An international effort to understand the building blocks of matter is creating opportunities for ���Ĵ�ý faculty and students to help develop the technology and infrastructure that will make those discoveries possible.

Supported by a recent $400,000 grant from ResearchNB’s Impact Fund, physics professor Dr. David Hornidge and his research group are contributing to the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a planned particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Their work connects undergraduate research at ���Ĵ�ý Allison with a Canadian collaboration developing key infrastructure for the facility. 

For Hornidge, the impact begins long before the collider produces its first results.
 

“This is a long project. This EIC probably won’t fire up until 2035,” he says. “But from now until then, we have brilliant students being trained hands-on to become future engineers, scientists, researchers, and professors. Initial investments like this one can come back three or four-fold in future output.”

The EIC will collide electrons with protons and ions to investigate what happens inside matter, including questions about the origins of proton mass and spin. Answering those questions requires sophisticated equipment — and people with the skills to design, build, test, and operate it.

���Ĵ�ý Allison’s contribution includes people and equipment supporting the barrel calorimeter, a component of the facility’s detector, alongside modelling and simulation work. Students will contribute to the development process, including using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to investigate how detector systems will perform.

The ResearchNB investment supports Hornidge’s project, Research and Development for the Electron-Ion Collider. It will help leverage a $5.34-million Canada Foundation for Innovation Fund grant led by colleagues at the University of Manitoba, with ���Ĵ�ý Allison, the University of Regina, and the University of Victoria as co-applicants.

Hornidge credits ���Ĵ�ý Allison’s Research Office with helping secure the support and identify opportunities to involve New Brunswick Community College (NBCC)’s engineering department as a partner.
 

Across Hornidge’s research program, students work with electronics and detectors, collect and analyse data, and learn specialized software. They encounter the practical challenges of experimental physics: understanding equipment, testing an approach, and figuring out what the results mean.

Hornidge has taken students to an accelerator laboratory in Mainz, Germany almost every summer since joining ���Ĵ�ý Allison in 2003. Those experiences are part of a broader commitment to giving undergraduates responsibility and access to working research environments and are funded by grants like NSERC.

That preparation opens doors. Hornidge says colleagues recruiting graduate students value the experience ���Ĵ�ý Allison students bring to their programs. One former student spent three years contributing to the EIC project as an undergraduate and is now pursuing a PhD at MIT.

Skills in computing, electronics, artificial intelligence, and advanced instrumentation have applications beyond particle physics. Hornidge sees opportunities for students to carry that experience into further research, industry, or businesses of their own.

For the ���Ĵ�ý Allison group, the work ahead includes continued modelling and simulation, contributions to detector development, and refining opportunities with NBCC.

As the project advances, successive groups of undergraduates will have opportunities to contribute to an international scientific effort while building their own capabilities. For ���Ĵ�ý Allison and New Brunswick, that is an impact that begins well before the first collision.

Read more about the ���Ĵ�ý Allison Physics Department.