Friday Flyer/News
Submitted by kcecire
on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - 12:53
Friday Flyer - May 27, 2016
Last Friday Flyer of the 2015–2016 Academic Year!
Spotlight on Summer 2016: The end of the 2015–2016 academic year is upon us, and as students break for summer, so too will the Friday Flyer (except for any special editions that we may run). Summer will be busy for QuarkNet, including Data Camp at Fermilab, HST at CERN, Inspiring Science Education in Greece and workshops at centers across the country to list a few events. The 2016 AAPT Summer Meeting will be in Sacramento on July 16–20; Ken and Shane both plan to attend and hope to see many of you there. While summer can be a time to break from the hustle and bustle of the school year, it's also a time for many teachers to retool, network, and prepare for an even better 2016–2017!
News from QuarkNet Central: News this week comes from two of our QuarkNet centers and represents some of the great work that's taking place within QuarkNet.
(1) From the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez Center: The 2016 University of Puerto Rico Outreach and Engagement Recognition Awards go to the UPRM QuarkNet Center. Congratulations to mentors Hector Mendez and Samuel Santana for this honor.
(2) From the Boston Center: Students at Medford High School (Medford, MA) recently performed a study using their cosmic ray detector to determine the speed of a muon. Here's more about the study, including data, pictures and a link to the poster. Thanks to Mike Wadness for sharing!
Physics Experiment Roundup: The Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillation (RENO) in South Korea announces the release of new results. The CLOUD experiment at CERN suggests that the pre-industrial climate may have been cloudier than presently thought. (Who knew? Climate research at CERN!)
Resources: Find out how tiny neutrinos can cause huge stars to go supernova in this symmetry article. Have you ever wondered what all of those symbols represent on Fermilab's unofficial seal? Check here to see the answers.
Just for Fun: What would a rainbow look like on Earth if we had two suns like Tatooine? What If? offers an answer to this hypothetical question.
Look for the return of Friday Flyer in September . . . Have a great summer!
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - May 20, 2016
On time as usual!
Spotlight on the Idaho State University QuarkNet Center: Idaho State is one of our centers that is especially strong in the cosmic ray program. Cosmic fellow Robert Franckowiak and mentor Steve Shropshire worked with the group last summer on plateauing detectors and blessing data; the teachers took it from there during the school year. One noteworthy example is when teacher Steve Millward's students wanted to study the effects of electric fields on cosmic rays: Steve brought his students (and his principal!) at Grace High School to a local Rocky Mountain Power substation; read all about it and then check out the e-Lab poster.
News from QuarkNet Central: One of the items that came out of the recent Facilitator Workshop was an enhanced "How to..." section of the QuarkNet website. It gives new information on things you can do with the site, including finding an archive of the Friday Flyer. Take a look. The much bigger thing that came out was an enthusiastic group of fellows and staff who can bring a workshop to your center. Here's the schedule so far. (Please check it; do we have your information correct?) And here is our "brochure" for QuarkNet workshops. If you haven't contacted us about your dates or a workshop request, please do so.
Physics Experiment Roundup: The LHC is up and running! Read about how it starts with the CERN accelerator chain. Be part of the process with LHC@Home.
Resources: We go on a lot—justifiably—about the amazing particle physics experiments from LHC to DUNE to AMS. Often it all starts with theory. So just what do theorists do, aside from calculations on the back of envelopes? Find out from Fermi News.
Just for Fun: Physics Girl explains quarks with candies. Why not?
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - May 13, 2016
Spotlight on the QuarkNet Fellows: We held off the Friday Flyer for a Monday release in order to update you on some weekend QuarkNet activity at Fermilab. The Cosmic, LHC, Leadership, and Teaching & Learning fellows, along with QuarkNet staff and evaluators (all pictured below) gathered this past Friday–Saturday in order to increase the quality, effectiveness, and consistency of all QuarkNet workshops. We learned about and discussed implementation of professional development best practices, and were able to perform "lesson studies" on a few activities from the Data Portfolio in which fellows were able to use both their "student hats" and "teacher hats." We were even able to capture a few images of the fellows in action, including building a histogram and discussing results for TOTEM Data Express and learning how to do a time-of-flight study using a cosmic ray muon detector.
News from QuarkNet Central: As you may have guessed from the "Spotlight" section above, the QuarkNet fellows and staff are more ready than ever to spread out to centers this summer to facilitate these workshops. We are looking forward to these experiences working with the teachers and mentors at centers all over the country. Mentors and lead teachers: It's not too late to schedule one of these workshops for this summer; just contact one of the QuarkNet staff if you're interested!
Physics Experiment Roundup: The LHC at CERN is back up and running beautifully as it begins its ambitious 2016 physics season in which physicists plan to collect six times more data than in 2015.. Here are some images from CMS at the start of the 2016 physics run.
Resources: Fermilab's Don Lincoln talks about the physics of g-2 in this YouTube video. Find out more about where mass comes from in this symmetry article.
Just for Fun: Check out this particle accelerator and collider of a different kind—using magnets and marbles! (Warning: You may have to endure a short advertisement at the beginning of this video, but it's worth it!)
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - May 6, 2016
It's the Friday Flyer on Monday! We apologize for the delay.
Spotlight on the Purdue University QuarkNet Center: You may (and should!) know about EQUIP, the spiffy program to interface your computer to the QuarkNet cosmic ray detector. Well, the Purdue QuarkNet center, is "where EQUIP was born"—that is what the P is for—as it was orginally designed by mentor Matthew Jones. Purdue continues to have an active QuarkNet program as well as stays involved in CMS data, including masterclasses. Last summer, lead teacher and LHC fellow Marla Glover introduced new teachers to particle physics. This summer, Purdue continues to move forward.
News from QuarkNet Central: The QuarkNet fellows are getting together next weekend at Fermilab to work on the art and science of facilitating workshops so that more fellows can be facilitators and all are up to speed on best practices. After the meeting, they will be rarin' to go, so, center leaders, book those workshops! (Learn more.)
Physics Experiment Roundup: Fermilab has a nice new video about DUNE/LBNF. Note the new linac location—"linac parking" in the west lot will never be the same—but mostly, note the cool new possibilities for neutrino physics.
Resources: There is a GUT feeling, as found in the recent issue of symmetry, and then there is hard evidence, as in Don Lincoln's video on the evidence for QED. There it is, QED.
Just for Fun: Lazy, hazy summer is upon us—the season for making vortices in the pool! Thank you, Physics Girl (really!), who also shows how to calculate pi with darts.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - April 29, 2016
Spotlight on the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab QuarkNet Center: This center held its ninth "Physics in and through Cosmology" five-day workshop last June at LBNL. Ten teachers and 42 high school students participated in this workshop that consisted of a combination of hands-on activities (including work with ATLAS data and cosmic ray muon detectors), tours, and talks on a variety of topics such as general relativity, the ATLAS detector, and mapping the universe. One student participant commented, "I like everything about the workshop because I get to learn about the universe, meet new people, learn science from many professionals, visit laboratories, have fun, and get fed." What more could you ask for?!
News from QuarkNet Central: Summer workshop plans at centers are starting to fall into place. We are still collecting information on summer activities, particularly dates of your meetings and possible QuarkNet Data and e-Lab workshops you might want to bring in; check out the possibilities. Send your information and queries to your QuarkNet contact or to any staff member. Could more teachers at your center use a cosmic ray muon detector? We can help with those requests too.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Fermilab's Main Injector is back up and running after a transformer fire last weekend. At CERN, things are going well as the LHC recommissioning draws to a close. Back at Fermilab, ANNIE (Accelerator Neutrino-Neutron Interaction Experiment) began taking data on 15 April.
Resources: This TechCrunch article gives a shout-out to masterclasses as it describes CERN's recent release of 300 TB of LHC data. What's one of the hottest jobs in physics these days? Two words: accelerator scientist! Speaking of scientists . . . click here to meet some very interesting Fermilab scientists. One of those featured scientists, Don Lincoln, writes about bringing dark matter to Earth. Lastly, little in this world—including science—is clear-cut. This Wired article suggests that the only path to real understanding involves confusion.
Just for Fun: It's that time of year again . . . whether it's formative, summative, chapter, unit, AP, IB, state, or final . . . testing season is here. Looking for a way to cut down on cheating while finding a use for that dusty old green board in the front of your classroom? Try this teacher anti-cheat technique when you give your next test!
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - April 29, 2016
Spotlight on the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Center: This center held its ninth "Physics In and Through Cosmology" five-day workshop last June at LBNL. Ten teachers and 42 high school students participated in this workshop that consisted of a combination of hands-on activities (including work with ATLAS data and cosmic ray muon detectors), tours, and talks on a variety of topics such as general relativity, the ATLAS detector, and mapping the universe. One student participant commented, "I like everything about the workshop because I get to learn about the universe, meet new people, learn science from many professionals, visit laboratories, have fun, and get fed." What more could you ask for?!
News from QuarkNet Central: Summer workshop plans at centers are starting to fall into place. We are still collecting information on summer activities, particularly dates of your meetings and possible QuarkNet Data and e-Lab workshops you might want to bring in; check out the possibilities. Send your information and queries to your QuarkNet contact or to any staff member. Could more teachers at your center use a cosmic ray muon detector? We can help with those requests too.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Fermilab's Main Injector is back up and running after a transformer fire last weekend. At CERN, things are going well as the LHC recommissioning draws to a close. Back at Fermilab, ANNIE (the Accelerator Neutrino-Neutron Interaction Experiment) began taking data on 15 April.
Resources: ThisTechCrunch article gives a shout-out to Masterclasses as it describes CERN's recent release of 300 TB of LHC Data. What's one of the hottest jobs in physics these days? Two words: accelerator scientist! Speaking of scientists...click here to meet some very interesting Fermilab scientists. One of those featured scientists, Don Lincoln, writes about bringing dark matter to Earth. Lastly, little in this world - including science - is clear cut. This Wired article suggests that the only path to real understanding involves confusion.
Just for Fun: It's that time of year again...whether it's formative, summative, chapter, unit, AP, IB, state, or final...testing season is here. Looking for a way to cut down on cheating while finding a use for that dusty old green board in the front of your classroom? Try this teacher anti-cheat technique when you give your next test!
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - April 22, 2016
Spotlight on Joel Griffith: You may not know Joel Griffith yet, but sooner or later you will. A graduate of Notre Dame with a PhD in Atomic Physics, Joel joined the QuarkNet IT team late last year. He has been managing the move of QuarkNet servers from Argonne to Notre Dame and has taken on various projects to improve our computing infrastructure. Joel is a native of Tennessee who did his undergraduate work at the University of the South and got his master's degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He likes Thai food and good movies, including science fiction. Asked the perennial Star Wars vs. Star Trek question, Joel jumped on Star Wars with no hesitation.
News from QuarkNet Central: Mentors and center leaders: We are still collecting information on summer activities, particularly dates of your meetings and possible QuarkNet Data and e-Lab workshops you might want to bring in; check out the possibilities. Send your information and queries to your QuarkNet contact or to any staff member.
Mystified??? (Aside from the face on Mars and CP violation?) What would you like to know about using the QuarkNet website? We have a "How to..." section with some helpful articles. There is room for more. What would you like to be able to do on the website? Send Ken your query, and maybe he can make a "How to..." article about it.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Want to learn more about the neutrino frontier at Fermilab and down the beamline to Sanford Lab? Then read up on these Five Fascinating Facts about DUNE; the neutrinos must flow.
Resources: Speaking of CP violation, learn a bit about the odds and evens of it in this Fermilab article about the old Theta and Tau question. To help you answer your own questions about particle physics, CMS has just released a large new cache of data.
Just for Fun: Know physics, know baseball: Three Baseball Myths Debunked by Physics. Have an idea of what the next 100 years of physics will be like? Write it up for this Essay Contest. Both items come from Physics Today.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - April 15, 2016
Spotlight on the Cosmic Ray e-Lab: Want to have your class collect data on cosmic particles from supernovae using high-energy physics detectors? Try the Cosmic Ray e-Lab where students and teachers all over the world collect data on muons they observe that have been created in high-energy cosmic ray air showers. Students develop experiments and can measure the muon lifetime, speed of muons, and muon rates, as well as distributions in time and space of showers of multiple muons. This week, schools are recording muons with identical detector setups during International Muon Week 2016. Lead teachers and mentors: Whether you are part of a center with lots of cosmic ray experience or a beginner, consider a Cosmic Ray e-Lab workshop this summer. Contact Mark to inquire.
Physics Experiment Roundup: The recommissioning of the LHC has made good progress since the first beam was injected last month. LHC software is now 20 years old, so it's time for a software upgrade. Further along in the future (mid-2020s), physicists have plans to upgrade the magnets in the next version of the LHC.
Resources: Learn more about the neutron in this BBC radio program about the subatomic particle. This Scientific American article discusses a recent measurement that the universe is expanding faster than it "should" be, even when considering what we think we know about dark energy. Learn about physics concepts using art, as demonstrated in this symmetry article. Be sure to check out the "Magnetic Movie"!
Just for Fun: Registration for the 2016 Summer AAPT Meeting in Sacramento opened this week. This guide from PhD Comics may help you determine whether or not you should submit a paper!
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - April 8, 2016
Spotlight on the CMS e-Lab: You had a great Data Camp and you want to share it with your class, but they are not ready for CSV files full of four-vectors. What will you do? It's the month after International Masteclasses, and your students are clamoring for more CMS data. Where are you going to get it? Well, try the QuarkNet CMS e-Lab, where students can make mass plots to study particles and explore the parameter space with different histograms. By the end of this academic year, the CMS e-Lab will be upgraded, changing procedures a bit but also enabling new data and new analyses. That means this will be a great summer to have a CMS e-Lab workshop. Please take note, mentors and center leaders. Contact Ken to inquire.
News from QuarkNet Central: Attention mentors and lead teachers! Due today: your RFP form for your center to indicate the level of support requested for 2016. The sooner you can set and communicate dates for your summer workshop, the better. Please let your QuarkNet main point of contact know these dates once chosen. Your point of contact can also assist if you would like to include one of these workshop experiences and to order or return cosmic ray muon detectors.
BIG WEEK, BIG DATA! This coming week, April 11-15, is International Muon Week. If you have a detector, sign up! The assignment is to take flux data all or a part of the week and share it. To learn more, read the instructions or contact Mark Adams.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Things are happening in the collider world this week. The electron machine, BEPC-II, in Beijing has set a new luminosity record for its type of accelerator, while the RHIC experiment at Brookhaven National Lab has been colliding polarized protons and learning more about their structure. On the dark (matter) side, physicists are finally set to try to reproduce controversial results from the DAMA experiment at Gran Sasso; let's see what they find!
Resources: In symmetry, learn how astrophysicists probe the Dark Matter Hot Spot of our galaxy. At the Sorbonne, Nobel Laureate Takaaki Kajita recently spoke on neutrino oscillations. What's cool? This slide from the talk in which he shows the νe-νμ imbalance from data; and learn about the Cosmic Pi detector being developed by CERN physicists.
Just for Fun: Having trouble writing that abstract? PhD Comics can help. And baseball season has begun: So far, the Mets are playing .500 ball against the Royals this year, sort of improving over the 2015 World Series . . . ah, the joys of the statistics of small numbers! And while QuarkNet had three teams in the NCAA semi-finals and one team in the finals (Syracuse women, way to go!), we were shut out of the big prize this year. Already looking to next year.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - April 1, 2016
Spotlight on the University of Rochester QuarkNet Center: Located on the banks of the Genesee River near the shore of Lake Ontario in New York State, the University of Rochester QuarkNet Center is led by Kevin McFarland and Carol Hoffman and Paul Sedita. In 2015, the summer workshop focused on activities around the analysis of MINERvA data. Teachers put on their "student hats" to experience these activities, then "teacher hats" to suggest improvements and to discuss implementation. Find out more about these activities at the MINERvA "Neutrinos in the Classroom" website.
News from QuarkNet Central: Attention mentors and lead teachers! A reminder to please be sure one person (mentor or lead teacher) completes the RFP form for your center on or before April 8 to indicate the level of support requested for 2016; additionally, it is not too early to set your dates and plan your summer workshops. Please let your QuarkNet main point of contact know these dates once chosen. Your point of contact can also assist if you would like to include one of these workshop experiences and to order or return cosmic ray muon detectors.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Protons are once again circulating around the 27-km beam pipes of the LHC after a 13-week maintenance break. The Long Baseline Neutrino Facility will power the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in order for scientists to learn more about neutrinos. Learn more about the basics of LBNF/DUNE in this recently released Fermilab video.
Resources: Find out more about the Italian Prime Minister's visit to Fermilab this week to celebrate nearly 40 years of collaboration between Italy and Fermilab in this article from Fermilab News, or this video from Fermilab's YouTube channel. Learn more about QED (quantum electrodynamics) in this video from Fermilab's Don Lincoln. You can also check out Don's video on perturbation theory, a powerful technique used to solve otherwise impossible mathematical equations.
Just for April Fools' Day: First, check out this week's Fermilab This Week this week. OK...now...a lot has been going on in particle physics and in QuarkNet. But who cares? Let's get to what really counts, like the QuarkNet initiative to use cosmic ray detectors for early warning against an ID4-style attack from space. Moving over to our Physics Experiment Roundup, we note that Dr. Knott Drew of Really Small National Laboratory and Arboretum has published a paper in The Journal of the Obscure titled "Finding evidence of gravitational waves in the Cavendish experiment." No comment from LIGO. Finally, for those who miss QuarkNet an der Elbe (anyone? anyone?), we have the first and only issue of QuarkNet on the Lena. Read with gusto!
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu