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Entrepreneurship Support Programs (ESP) in engineering provide education, mentoring, and advising for emerging entrepreneurs and their ventures. The impact of ESPs on engineering students’ professional formation and the acquisition of different attributes—such as creativity, risk-taking, empathy, and curiosity—is largely unknown. Though the social sciences have a strong and robust history of studying many of the attributes, such as creativity and problem-solving, typically associated with entrepreneurship, there has been little connection between this foundational research and the work of ESPs. In fact, two separate systematic reviews have shown that most published work in STEM entrepreneurship education is not theoretically grounded and does not follow standards of quality research approaches in the social sciences. In an effort to bridge the gap between social scientists and engineering entrepreneurship practitioners, the authors are conducting a two-phase study. Phase 1 of the study involves conducting a Delphi study to identify the top entrepreneurial attributes of professionals and researchers who lead ESPs. Phase 2 of the study includes conducting workshops with social scientists who study the attributes and ESP leaders. The goal of the workshops is to identify assessment frameworks grounded in social science theory and literature that will guide the measurement of the attributes. This session will focus on the results of the Delphi phase. Delphi study is a common research technique used to achieve consensus among experts (Hasson, Keeney, and McKenna, 2000). Seventy-three participants who lead or have led an ESP, have conducted research in entrepreneurship education, or act as administrators for relevant entrepreneurship programs were invited to participate in the Delphi study. Of the 73 invited, 14 completed at least two rounds of the Delphi study. All participants were experts in the field of engineering entrepreneurship education. The Delphi Study comprised three rounds- brainstorming, narrowing, and ranking. Each phase of the Delphi asked participants to think about three different sets of attributes: 1) entrepreneurial attributes that they thought were important in the development of an entrepreneur, 2) attributes in becoming a successful professional, and 3) attributes in working in an inclusive workspace. In the brainstorming phase, participants were sent an online questionnaire and were asked to brainstorm as many attributes as they could think of. The results of the brainstorming questionnaire were consolidated and used to develop the narrowing questionnaire, where participants were asked to narrow all attributes to the top 10 key attributes The results from the narrowing questionnaire were then used to develop a ranking questionnaire, where participants were asked to rank the items on a scale of importance with 1 being the most important to 10 being the least important for each set of attributes. The results of the phase 3 questionnaire were analyzed to identify the attributes that were ranked the highest among a majority of the participants. This paper discusses the findings of the Delphi Study and its implications in assessing the impact of ESP on entrepreneur formation. 

Whitepaper for the 2023 NSAC Long Range Plan 

Abstract Pulsar halos are regions around middle-aged pulsars extending out to tens of parsecs. The large extent of the halos and well-defined central cosmic-ray accelerators make this new class of Galactic sources an ideal laboratory for studying cosmic-ray transport. LHAASO J0621+3755 is a candidate pulsar halo associated with the middle-aged gamma-ray pulsar PSR J0622+3749. We observed LHAASO J0621+3755 with VERITAS and XMM-Newton in the TeV and X-ray bands, respectively. For this work, we developed a novel background estimation technique for imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope observations of such extended sources. No halo emission was detected with VERITAS (0.3–10 TeV) or XMM-Newton (2–7 keV) within 1^∘and $10^{\prime }$around PSR J0622+3749, respectively. Combined with the LHAASO Kilometer Square Array (KM2A) and Fermi-LAT data, VERITAS flux upper limits establish a spectral break at  ∼1–10 TeV, a unique feature compared with Geminga, the most studied pulsar halo. We model the gamma-ray spectrum and LHAASO-KM2A surface brightness as inverse Compton emission and find suppressed diffusion around the pulsar, similar to Geminga. A smaller diffusion suppression zone and harder electron injection spectrum than Geminga are necessary to reproduce the spectral cutoff. A magnetic field ≤1μG is required by our XMM-Newton observation and synchrotron spectral modeling, consistent with Geminga. Our findings support slower diffusion and lower magnetic field around pulsar halos than the Galactic averages, hinting at magnetohydrodynamic turbulence around pulsars. Additionally, we report the detection of an X-ray point source spatially coincident with PSR J0622+3749, whose periodicity is consistent with the gamma-ray spin period of 333.2 ms. The soft spectrum of this source suggests a thermal origin. 

We report the characteristics of collisional plasma shocks formed during interactions between low density (ne≈1015 cm−3), low temperature (Te≈2 eV), high velocity (30 km s−1), plasma jets and stagnant plasma of similar parameters. This investigation seeks to probe the structure of shocks in multi-ion-species plasmas, in particular, the presence of gradient-driven ion species separation at the shock front. The railgun-accelerated jets utilized here have previously been shown to exist in a collisional regime with intra-jet collisional mean-free-path substantially smaller than jet size [Schneider et al., Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 29, 045013 (2020)]. To induce collisions, a dielectric barrier is located downstream of the railgun to stagnate an initially supersonic plasma jet. Around the time of stagnation, the railgun emits a second jet which shortly collides with the stagnant plasma. The presence of a structure emitting in the UV-visible band is evident in high-speed photographs of the moments immediately following the arrival of the second jet at the stagnant plasma. Analysis of interferometric and spectroscopic data suggests that the observed increase in density from the jet to the post-collision plasma is consistent with the formation of a bow shock structure with a multi-millimeter-scale ion shock layer. 

Abstract We present the design and performance of a four-phased radiofrequency (RF) carpet system for ion transport between 200–600 mbar, significantly higher than previously demonstrated RF carpet applications. The RF carpet, designed with a 160 $$\upmu $$ $\mu$m pitch, is applied to the lateral collection of ions in xenon at pressures up to 600 mbar. We demonstrate transport efficiency of caesium ions across varying pressures, and compare with microscopic simulations made in the SIMION package. The novel use of an N-phased RF carpet can achieve ion levitation and controlled lateral motion in a denser environment than is typical for RF ion transport in gases. This feature makes such carpets strong candidates for ion transport to single ion sensors envisaged for future neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments in xenon gas. 

Abstract We investigate the performance of , a 7.5 GPU-accelerated photon propagation tool compared with a single-threaded simulation. We compare the simulations using an improved model of the gaseous time projection chamber. Performance results suggest that improves simulation speeds by between$$58.47\pm {0.02}$$ $58.47\pm 0.02$and$$181.39\pm {0.28}$$ $181.39\pm 0.28$times relative to a CPU-only simulation and these results vary between different types of GPU and CPU. A detailed comparison shows that the number of detected photons, along with their times and wavelengths, are in good agreement between and . 

A<sc>bstract</sc> If neutrinoless double beta decay is discovered, the next natural step would be understanding the lepton number violating physics responsible for it. Several alternatives exist beyond the exchange of light neutrinos. Some of these mechanisms can be distinguished by measuring phase-space observables, namely the opening angle cosθamong the two decay electrons, and the electron energy spectra,T₁andT₂. In this work, we study the statistical accuracy and precision in measuring these kinematic observables in a future xenon gas detector with the added capability to precisely locate the decay vertex. For realistic detector conditions (a gas pressure of 10 bar and spatial resolution of 4 mm), we find that the average$$ \overline{\cos\ \theta } $$ $\overline{cos\theta }$and$$ \overline{T_1} $$ $\overline{T_1}$values can be reconstructed with a precision of 0.19 and 110 keV, respectively, assuming that only 10 neutrinoless double beta decay events are detected. 

Abstract The imaging of individual Ba²⁺ions in high pressure xenon gas is one possible way to attain background-free sensitivity to neutrinoless double beta decay and hence establish the Majorana nature of the neutrino. In this paper we demonstrate selective single Ba²⁺ion imaging inside a high-pressure xenon gas environment. Ba²⁺ions chelated with molecular chemosensors are resolved at the gas-solid interface using a diffraction-limited imaging system with scan area of 1 × 1 cm²located inside 10 bar of xenon gas. This form of microscopy represents key ingredient in the development of barium tagging for neutrinoless double beta decay searches in¹³⁶Xe. This also provides a new tool for studying the photophysics of fluorescent molecules and chemosensors at the solid-gas interface to enable bottom-up design of catalysts and sensors.