Friday Flyer - April 28, 2023
Spotlight on Boston and beyond
The Boston Area QuarkNet Center, a collaboration between Brown and Northeastern Universities, is one of the oldest and most active centers in our program. The Boston Center started in 1999—not coincidentally, the year QuarkNet started—and continues with the same lead teacher, Rick Dower, and two original mentors in Darien Wood and Ulrich Heintz. Rick is also an LHC fellow and two more Boston teachers are QuarkNet fellows as well.
The past year, the Boston team had their three-day summer workshop at Roxbury Latin School in the West Roxbury section of Boston, with a study of nuclear fusion. Teachers dug into the physics of fusion on the first day and visited the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Their visit included a look at the test chamber for the SPARC high temperature superconducting magnet prototype. The teachers met again for their fall 2022 evening meeting in early December and started planning their participation in International Masterclasses. The CMS masterclass at Northeastern was a great success with teachers and students from all over the Boston-Providence area and from as far away as Vermont. Now, the team is planning their spring 2023 meeting and gearing up for summer 2023.
News from QuarkNet Central
Center Leads: It's that time of year again when planning summer workshops at centers is in full swing. Please keep in mind that there are several workshops that QuarkNet staff and/or fellows can bring to teachers at your center. Questions? News of your plans? Your QuarkNet staff members are here to help! Please contact us!
Teachers: Since we are planning those summer workshops, we hope you will join in! Please contact your mentor or lead teachers about the latest at your center and how you can be involved. For more QuarkNet opportunities, please feel free to contact your QuarkNet staff members.
Everyone: A QuarkNet Cosmic Ray Muon Detector (CRMD) in the closet is a CRMD wasted. Another QuarkNet teacher and student group can put it to good use. If you have a detector that you cannot use for any reason, please do not pass it on to someone outside of QuarkNet, even in your school, or leave it in the closet. Instead, contact your mentor and Dave Hoppert so the detector can be reconditioned and passed on to a new user.
Physics Experiment Roundup
APS Physics has interesting experimental and observational results from space. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station has worked out how the magnetic field of the sun affects galactic cosmic rays. Another article explains multimessenger observations of supernovae while yet another shows how machine learning improves the famous black hole image from the center of Messier 87.
Getting back to earth, APS Physics also reports on the final measurements from the Daya Bay neutrino experiment. CERN Bulletin gives some exciting news with stable beams at 6.8 TeV in the LHC and work at ATLAS to probe fundamental symmetries with the Higgs boson.
Resources
Are you looking for something interdisciplinary? If you are, APS Physics has an article for you and your students about a rare video with Georges Lemaître the originator of the Big Bang theory. Fr. Lemaître speaks French in the video, with Dutch subtitles. Physics, cosmology, foreign languages, and history—what more can you want?
Perhaps you are seeking to know what is on the horizon for our field. According to APS Physics, there is wide recognition of a need for education in quantum information science and technology (QIST). The article is about building resources and networks at the undergraduate level. Still, at the base of it is quantum physics. Perhaps high school is not too early to start building that base for students. Learn (a lot) more about QIST in the (longish) Quantum Information Science and Technology Spotlight from the Department of Energy. (H/T George Odell.)
Let's top off our resources with some videos from CMS:
- What do we expect to explore during LHC Run 3?
- Observation of ttH production - in 5 minutes.
- CMS Open Data workshop 2022!
- CMS Detector Reacts!
Just for Fun
CERN Bulletin has some interesting news about particle physics technology with benefits to other fields: the VESPER facility assists in exploration of the moons of Jupiter and a new compact accelerator for analysis of historic artifacts and works of art.
We are well into spring and warm weather sports are in the air. And physic videos are right there, too. West Virginia University offers The Physics of Baseball while Pueblo Science gives us basics in the Physics of Swimming. Daniela Hernandez of the Wall Street Journal reports on The Mind-Bending Physics that Give Tennis Pros Their Edge. Golf Smart Academy rounds it out with Net Force Discussion - Simplified Golf Physics.
xkcd? Sure: Try Recipe Relativity, Helium Reserve, and Towed Message.
QuarkNet Staff
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Spencer Pasero: spasero@fnal.gov
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu