Friday Flyer - November 4, 2016

Spotlight on the Boston Area QuarkNet Center: The "Boston Group" is one of the oldest QuarkNet centers, being in the "inaugural class" of 1999. They have three QuarkNet fellows in the center and are active in International Masterclasses, the Cosmic Ray Studies program, and in QuarkNet opportunities like Data Camp and CERN HST. (Two teachers went to Data Camp last summer.) They meet once per month and for a workshop in the summer. This past summer, lead teacher (since 1999!) Rick Dower took the group on a tour of the history of particle physics. Rick also built a laser interferometer for use in LIGO e-Lab workshops, and Mike Wadness reported in the QuarkNet site on the results he and his students got from a muon time-of-flight experiment.

News from QuarkNet Central: Registration for Masterclasses 2017 is going strong. The Fermilab registration has 17 masterclass institutes registered so far; leaders should sign up soon to get their slots. And we've opened more slots: March 11, 30, and 31 and April 1 (what could go wrong?). A few dates were added for CERN masterclasses as well. To learn how to access the new dates and get the latest news, go to the IMC circular for this week.

Beamline for Schools, the competition in which student teams propose experiments at CERN—and get to do their experiment there if they win—is now open. To learn more, go to the website.

Physics Experiment Roundup: Know your particle detector! Put it to the test (beam)! Read more from Fermilab News at Work. But what can you do with all this particle stuff? Well, neutron holography. In the department of the slightly more esoteric, we have computing dark matter as axions. Last experiment: What was the mass of that antiproton, anyway? The ASACUSA experiment at CERN uses hybrid matter-antimatter atoms to find out. Really.

Using the QuarkNet Website: Don't browse all those menus if you don't have to! Look up! In the black header on every page is a search box. Read up on how to search. 

Resources: Will we ever see Spock sporting a goatee? Perhaps this symmetry video, In search of a parallel universe, can help answer; symmetry also asks us to consider chameleon dark matter particles.

Just for Fun: Alright, here is Spock with a goatee. Seen that interesting twisty sculpture at Fermilab, the Tractricious? Read its story. In Germany, there is Physics in Advent. (It must be getting late in the year.) And . . . a little XKCD. 

QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu