Rutgers 2020 QuarkNet Annual Report

This summer The Rutgers QuarkNet Center held a two-week workshop with a three-hour session each day on quantum computing attended by twenty-two high school teachers. The emphasis of the workshop was on introducing the basic concepts of quantum mechanics and quantum computing and developing methods for introducing this material into the high school classroom. The teachers also gained experience on using IBM’s Qiskit utility to program actual quantum computers. Because of the Covid virus, this workshop was necessarily run remotely. We are planning a follow-up workshop to be held once conditions improve sufficiently to allow it to be run in-person. We are hoping in can be held this spring. Also because of the Covid virus, for the first time in twenty years, we did not hold our highly acclaimed two-week Rutgers QuarkNet program for high school students. We look forward to resuming this program in the coming summer. We were also unable to hold a Masterclass program that we had planned for this past spring.

Mentor: Steve Schnetzer

Rutgers University is one of the oldest QuarkNet centers having been established in 2000 the second year of the NSF-funded QuarkNet program. Our center has trained over twenty high school physics teachers from throughout New Jersey in leading edge particle physics and have involved them in the construction, operation and classroom use of cosmic ray detector kits. For over ten years, we have run a highly successful two-week summer program for high school teachers and students.