Spotlight on the Virginia Center
This center is more formally called the Hampton University/College of William and Mary/George Mason University QuarkNet Center but, back when it was the only QuarkNet center in Virginia, it was easier to say "Virginia Center" and the name stuck, even after Virginia Tech joined as a separate center. This year the center had a summer workshop at William and Mary where they did a LIGO e-Lab workshop and learned about "emergent gravity" from Josh Erlich, their theorist mentor. Josh shares the mentor duties with Phil Rubin at George Mason University. The center met there earlier this month to prepare for masterclasses and met at the Steward School in Richmond in November. The center stays active throughout the year and meets along the I-64/I-95 corridor from Hampton Roads to Richmond to Northern Virginia where the teachers and mentors are distributed. One of the functions of the Virginia Center is to help Deborah Roudebush, who edits and vets new additions to the Data Portfolio, to test activities and give feedback. Keeping busier still, the Virginia Center will have two masterclasses this year: one at William and Mary and the other at GMU.
News from QuarkNet Central
International Masterclasses 2018 are going full force at CERN and start soon at Fermilab. Follow them on the IMC twitter feed, or tweet your own masterclass experience, #LHCIMC18. The latest IMC circular gives information on how to make the Vidyo link in your masterclass videoconference. If you have not yet signed up for a masterclass and are interested in joining, contact Ken.
QuarkNet Nuts and Bolts
Wondering about different types of QuarkNet accounts? Would you like to get a new account. This document may help. You can use the form at the bottom of that page to request an account you may not have, but be sure to e-mail Shane, Mark, or Ken to let them know there is a new request.
Physics Experiment Roundup
We go astro with an explosive article in Gizmodo announcing the most distant supernova ever. On to particle physics: Fermilab has set a new record for the rate of protons produced in the Booster accelerator. More protons, more experimental data!
Resources
Studying the quantum world both mystifies and enlightens. The Perimeter Institute in Canada is here to help with a new video, The Riddle of the Quantum Sphinx. (H/T Rick Dower.) We stay quantum in symmetry with The secret life of Higgs bosons. Getting back to International Masterclasses, the Particle Cards activity we've been working on as an alternative for masterclass prep is now in the QuarkNet Data Portfolio. (It is the 5th from the top.) And thanks to our colleagues at Netzwerk Teilchenwelt in Germany, who invented the deck of particle cards, or Teilchensteckbriefe.
Just for Fun
It is hard not to love a BBC Radio 4 program, Domestic Science, that bills itself as "the festival of the spoken nerd." And you can even listen online. We close with grand unification, xkcd-style.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Deborah Roudebush: droudebush@cox.net
Jeremy Smith: jsmith10@bcps.org
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu