2018 Annual Report - Vanderbilt University

Submitted by bill.gabella on Thu, 10/18/2018 - 08:34

Vanderbilt University QuarkNet 2018

Personnel

The Vanderbilt University QuarkNET group is mentored by William (Bill) Gabella, which much help from emeritus mentor Medford Webster and a volunteer teacher Terry King. We advise the teachers and students on the use of the Cosmic Ray Muon Detectors (CRMDs), we maintain them, and we help with either setup of our loaned out CRMDs or with those that are permanently at the school. We also host the 5 day summer workshop for the teachers.

Cosmic Ray Muon Detectors

The Vanderbilt QuarkNET has three "mentor" CRMDs: S/N 6181 and 6187 are two conventional cosmic ray muon detectors and S/N 6769 is an "unconventional" one---it has smaller scintillator paddles. The one with the small scintillators is most useful for looking at attenuation of the muon flux with materials, like water, or bricks, stacked between pairs of scintillators. These are routinely loaned to our high school teachers for their club and classroom work. The laptops running the detectors are nearing 7 years old, so we are likely to seek newer ones. The last four were kindly donated by a group when they were three years old after "normal" retirement for that group. We also have several CRMDs that are permanently in the schools:
S/N 6851 in Bowling Green, KY, with Diana Gigante;
S/N 6850 in Nashville, TN, with James Anderson;
S/N 6891 in Mt. Juliet, TN, with Meaghan Berry;
S/N 6892 in Murfressboro, TN, with Kim Baumann; and
S/N 6795 in Cross Plains, TN, with Bill Hunnicutt.

We are using the Java program Equip for managing the CRMDs from the Fedora Linux laptops that we have. This works but there are several aspects of it that would be nice to have working and maintained. A facility to output a spreadsheet of the rise and fall times of complete pulses like the older LabVIEW program did would be helpful.

Summer Workshop 25-29 June 2018

The main activity of the Vanderbilt QuarkNet Group is hosting the five day workshop for current group members and new science teachers. It was attended by 8 teachers, 7 current group members and one new physics teacher. This year it included talks by Vanderbilt faculty and graduate students, and hands-on activities relating mostly to using the CRMDs and to using the eLab facilities for Cosmic Ray Muons. We also did some demonstrations outside, around Vanderbilt's campus.

The first day and a half had talks on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), Vanderbilt University is a member of the collaboration, and the Large Hadron Collider. We heard from a graduate student about her particle physics research on CMS with a good particle physics introduction. We also heard from a post-doctoral researcher on his work with machine learning, again with a good introduction to that topic, and using it in particle physics. One of our astronomy faculty David Weintraub is a writer, and he was able to join us to talk about Mars, much in the same vein as his latest book "Life on Mars, what to know before we go." It was, as expected, well polished and quite enjoyed by all. Another post-doctoral researcher talked about his work discovering extrasolar planets, so-called exoplanets, especially using the new satellite TESS---Vanderbilt professors are members of the collaboration. A graduate student talked about her research using pulsars and especially the Nanograv collaboration using pulsars to detect gravitational waves. In keeping with out particle physics, astronomy, and gravitational waves theme, Gabella also talked about gravitational waves in general and especially GW170917, the binary neutron star merger seen by the LIGO/VIRGO gravitational wave detector. Which some consider the most important even in physics in some time. We also heard a talk about the "tension" in the different methods to measure the Hubble constant.

After our summary of physics news and review of some topics, we focused our efforts on using the Cosmic Ray Muon Detectors and especially using them with eLab. To that end, we setup three standard detectors in telescope configuration to measure the "speed-of-muons" / speed-of-light. We like this because it can be quite a standalone experiment and does not require the use of eLab if the students are facile at spreadsheets. We also like the necessity of confronting the systematics of having to swap two scintillator paddles to correct for the uncontrolled timing delays of the two channels, so that the timing subtraction can give just the time of a muon passing vertically through the detector. We also looked at the data using the eLab facility for this kind of data.

There were the usual number of lost accounts and passwords, but we found that the QuarkNet support folks were very helpful.

We also tried the variation of setting up a telescope vertically and compared to flux from one set up horizontally.

Late in the week, we left the lab for wandering around campus executing demonstrations, ones that might be useful in the classroom. On favorite, which some of us learned many years ago, is "dropping" a plastic bottle filled with water with a hole in the side near the bottom. Due ultimately to the Einstein equivalence principle, after loosening the top cap, water comes pouring out of the hole---but stops when you drop the bottle and while it is falling. It can be pretty dramatic. Of course this is true in any unpowered/ballistic trajectory. To prove this, we tossed leaking water bottles between us and in fact on good throws, with little rotation (mostly to be able to see the leak if it did leak), you could see the leak stop over the arc of the trajectory. This has the added side benefit that participants get a little wet on a hot summer day.

With Vanderbilt University changing their software for handling almost all business related activities, paying stipends was delayed. We started with our usual effort to have Vanderbilt write checks to each teacher receiving a stipend, but after some weeks that seemed the hardest route. In the end, we had the teachers fill out a form for direct deposit into their bank accounts, though Vanderbilt needed to treat them like "vendors" and they needed certification beyond just the bank and address information. So in the future, it appears there will be two forms for the teachers to fill out, the IRS I-9 and the Vanderbilt bank account information form.

It is becoming harder and harder to find a 5 day window that a quorum of our current teachers can attend. Many of our teachers go back to school by late July, and of course early July includes The Fourth, so vacation is common then. So it looks like late June might work best.