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This NSF ITEST project (Award # 2148429) at Illinois State University focuses on engaging students in four Chicago Public High Schools in an afterschool STEM program, SUPERCHARGE, where they experience hands on activities with renewable energy technologies and related sustainability-tied experiences. Between 10 and 20 students met weekly afterschool during the first year of implementation which was preceded by a planning year in which teachers provided feedback on activities and connections to the communities of the schools were developed. Four faculty were involved in the design of the project and activities and an additional group of undergraduate STEM majors were also involved in the design and pilot of all activities. Four goals frame this project and research. These are to learn how (1) high school students’ knowledge of STEM careers and STEM domains change across their participation; (2) the high school students improve their interest in STEM career attainment and their self-efficacy for career relevant skills; (3) the undergraduate STEM majors’ views about Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers develop across their participation; and (4) teachers’ knowledge of current STEM domains, skills, and careers change. To examine the impact of the programming on each stakeholder group, PEAR’s CIS-S and CIS-E surveys, interviews, activity surveys, and workshop surveys were used. Currently, the data from the first year of programming includes 21 pre-post student surveys and 10 surveys from the undergraduate designers and 9 surveys from the teachers in the program. At this time, statistical tests were not appropriate due to these small numbers, but future years will bolster these numbers, and we anticipate the ability to perform statistical tests as the data set grows. Therefore, we focus on a qualitative analysis of the surveys and interviews at this stage. 

The Energy Grid Card Game was designed for pre-college students (grades 6-12) to be played in an informal learning environment. The game explores the technical, environmental, and economic choices and challenges of using energy resources throughout our daily lives. Undergraduates at Illinois State University designed the activity as part of the NSF-funded SUPERCHARGE project, which seeks to improve access to STEM college and career pathways while making connections to engineering and sustainability-related problems that can be addressed in their communities. 

The following activities are examples from a unit of study that focuses on harnessing, using, and controlling energy. These activities were designed for pre-college learners in grades 6-12 in informal learning settings as part of the SUPERCHARGE project] by undergraduates at Illinois State University. The goal of the project is to promote interest in college and career pathways related to engineering, sustainability, and renewable energy technologies. 

A<sc>bstract</sc> A search for beyond-the-standard-model neutral Higgs bosons decaying to a pair of bottom quarks, and produced in association with at least one additional bottom quark, is performed with the CMS detector. The data were recorded in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the CERN LHC and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 36.7–126.9 fb⁻¹, depending on the probed mass range. No signal above the standard model background expectation is observed. Upper limits on the production cross section times branching fraction are set for Higgs bosons in the mass range of 125–1800 GeV. The results are interpreted in benchmark scenarios of the minimal supersymmetric standard model, as well as suitable classes of two-Higgs-doublet models. 

A<sc>bstract</sc> The measurements of the Higgs boson (H) production cross sections performed by the CMS Collaboration in the four-lepton (4ℓ, ℓ= e,μ) final state at a center-of-mass energy$$\sqrt{s}$$= 13.6 TeV are presented. These measurements are based on data collected with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC in 2022, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 34.7 fb⁻¹. Cross sections are measured in a fiducial region closely matching the experimental acceptance, both inclusively and differentially, as a function of the transverse momentum and the absolute value of the rapidity of the four-lepton system. The H → ZZ → 4ℓinclusive fiducial cross section is measured to be$${2.89}_{-0.49}^{+0.53}{\left({\text{stat}}\right)}_{-0.21}^{+0.29}\left({\text{syst}}\right)$$fb, in agreement with the standard model expectation of$${3.09}_{-0.24}^{+0.27}$$fb. 

A measurement of the Higgs boson mass and width via its decay to two $Z$bosons is presented. Proton-proton collision data collected by the CMS experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $138{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, is used. The invariant mass distribution of four leptons in the on-shell Higgs boson decay is used to measure its mass and constrain its width. This yields the most precise single measurement of the Higgs boson mass to date, $125.04\pm 0.12\mathrm{GeV}$, and an upper limit on the width ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}_H<330\mathrm{MeV}$at 95% confidence level. A combination of the on- and off-shell Higgs boson production decaying to four leptons is used to determine the Higgs boson width, assuming that no new virtual particles affect the production, a premise that is tested by adding new heavy particles in the gluon fusion loop model. This result is combined with a previous CMS analysis of the off-shell Higgs boson production with decay to two leptons and two neutrinos, giving a measured Higgs boson width of ${3.0}_{-1.5}^{+2.0}\mathrm{MeV}$, in agreement with the standard model prediction of 4.1 MeV. The strength of the off-shell Higgs boson production is also reported. The scenario of no off-shell Higgs boson production is excluded at a confidence level corresponding to 3.8 standard deviations. © 2025 CERN, for the CMS Collaboration2025CERN 

A<sc>bstract</sc> A search for heavy, long-lived, charged particles with large ionization energy loss within the silicon tracker of the CMS experiment is presented. A data set of proton-proton collisions at a center of mass energy at$$ \sqrt{s} $$ $\sqrt{s}$= 13 TeV, collected in 2017 and 2018 at the CERN LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 101 fb⁻¹, is used in this analysis. Two different approaches for the search are taken. A new method exploits the independence of the silicon pixel and strips measurements, while the second method improves on previous techniques using ionization to determine a mass selection. No significant excess of events above the background expectation is observed. The results are interpreted in the context of the pair production of supersymmetric particles, namely gluinos, top squarks, and tau sleptons, and of the Drell-Yan pair production of fourth generation (τ′) leptons with an electric charge equal to or twice the absolute value of the electron charge (e). An interpretation of a Z’ boson decaying to twoτ′ leptons with an electric charge equal to 2eis presented for the first time. The 95% confidence upper limits on the production cross section are extracted for each of these hypothetical particles.