Friday Flyer/News
Submitted by kcecire
on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - 12:53
Friday Flyer - March 25, 2016
Spotlight on the Wayne State University QuarkNet Center: Wayne State, located in downtown Motown, runs a cosmic ray research program every year for local high school students along with teachers and Rob Harr and Gil Paz. One of the projects this year was an experiment to measure the speed of muons (abstract). The center also partners with the Detroit Metro Area Physics Teachers; Rob and Gil often participate in meetings, show demos, and lead learning experiences for teachers.
News from QuarkNet Central: Mentors! Lead Teachers! Read this, please! It is getting to that time when we need to figure out summer workshops at QuarkNet centers. QuarkNet Central can help. Please check out these workshop experiences for teachers and then contact the staff member listed or your assigned staff member for consultation and planning. Also, please give us the dates of your summer meetings as soon as you can.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Old school—a surprisingly simple patent diagram for the superconducting magnet. Newer—inching toward benchtop particle accelerators and LHC just might see a new particle.
Resources: Fermilab physicist Mark Thomson explains matter and antimatter in a new Why I Love Neutrinos video. Theorist Carlo Rovelli offers insight into general relativity in this New York Times review of his new book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. From other side of the Pacific, Soochow University physicist Shian-Shyong Hsiao sent a cool and different video (in Chinese but mostly language-independent). The video starts slowly but then jumps to great demos, to students working with Raspberry Pi's, and at the end, to a portable cosmic ray detector with which Dr. Hsiao took data running the length of Taiwan from north to south.
Just for Fun: XKCD is maybe at its best with offbeat computer humor, like this, this, and this.
In QuarkNet, there are two kinds of March Madness. One is, of course, International Masterclasses, just wrapped up. Then there is that other thing, that NCAA basketball thing, in which we carefully track our QuarkNet centers. So far, of the four games that have been played in the Sweet 16, three were won by QuarkNet centers. (The other did not have a center competing, somehow.) Good work Kansas, Oregon, and Oklahoma! For the other four games, we can cheer tonight for IU, Iowa State, and Syracuse. Notre Dame and Wisconsin are playing each other, so, well, there it is.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - March18, 2016
Spotlight on QuarkNet, Notre Dame, and Chile: Recently, Pat Mooney, Ken Cecire and Chris Kolda, Physics Department Chair, retuned from a visit to Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile. While in Chile, they built cosmic ray detectors and had masterclass-based workshops with a strong teacher group under the leadership of Catolica particle physicist Ben Koch and teacher leader Daniela Gayoso. (Some of our readers may remember Daniela from Data Camp 2014.) Pat facilitated a special section of the masterclass workshop for advanced teachers to create code in SciLab to analyze CMS J/Ψ dimuon data; Chris and Ken brought "masterclasses cortos" to three different high schools. The program, MICA III, is sponsored by a Notre Dame International Andronico Luksic grant to foster collaboration between Notre Dame and Catolica. Tomorrow, Notre Dame and Catolica will meet online for their third annual masterclass videoconference.
News from QuarkNet Central: We received a letter recently from the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth looking for instructors in physics and physics-related topics for their summer programs. Who better than QuarkNet teachers? If you are interested in applying, visit the website.
Physics Experiment Roundup: R-parity violations in CMS and b-jet forward-backward asymmetry in CDF (yes, they are still analyzing Tevatron data) are two ways there might be evidence contrary to the Standard Model. Result: Standard Model 2, Challengers 0.
Resources: PHD TV goes all big astro with the videos Cosmic Inflation and Super Massive Black Holes. The BBC goes LHC.
Just for Fun: What's been going on with International Masterclasses? Look at the tweets at #LHCIMC16.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - March 11, 2016
Spotlight on the University of Cincinnati QuarkNet Center: Cincinnati had a very active 2015. Students and teachers spent much time working with cosmic ray detectors by performing studies at their school, participating in International Muon Week, and by bringing a set of detectors to Fermilab for calibration. This calibration involved using muons produced near the Lariat experiment at Fermilab's Test Beam, which occur at a higher rate than cosmic ray muons, resulting in a better calibration. Here is a look at some data before calibration vs. after calibration. In addition to detector work, the Cincinnati center hosted a masterclass for nearly 30 high school students, and hosted four high school students for a six-week summer research internship during which students analyzed MINOS and LHCb data.
News from QuarkNet Central: We are coming up on our last full week of masterclasses for 2016! Don't forget to follow or contribute to masterclass via social media including Twitter, @physicsIMC and #LHCIMC16, and Facebook.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Results from CERN's LHC may hint at a flaw in the Standard Model; read about this discrepancy involving the B meson. A new simulation that takes into account Einstein's theory of general relativity could help in understanding dark energy and the expanding universe.
Resources: Why does particle physicist Sowjanya Gollapinni love neutrinos? See why in this YouTube video. See images from Fermilab's Art of Darkness exhibit featuring celestial objects from Dark Energy Survey's Dark Energy Camera.
Just for Fun: Planning to see the new release of Ghostbusters this summer? Here's a little fact-checking of the particle physics in the movie trailer, with an actual physicist! Miss the recent total solar eclipse? No problem! See highlights in this video, courtesy of the San Francisco Exploratorium.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - March 4, 2016
Spotlight on the Vanderbilt University QuarkNet Center: Vanderbilt continues to be an active QuarkNet center led by mentor Dr. William Gabella, with the support of emeritus mentor Dr. Med Webster and lead teacher Terry King. In 2015, the center offered a weeklong summer workshop with nine teachers participating. Much of the 2015 workshop focused on using cosmic ray muon detectors and included a two-day cosmic workshop led by Bob Peterson. On Thursday of the workshop week, 11 high school students joined the teachers and used the CRMDs to perform a speed of muon experiment. Teachers also had a chance to view several physics demos by theorist and demo curator Dr. Sourish Dutta, some of which teachers were able to adapt to bring to their own classrooms.
News from QuarkNet Central: Masterclass season is in full swing, as students all over the world learn, analyze, collaborate and connect. Feel free to follow or contribute to masterclass via social media including Twitter, @physicsIMC and #LHCIMC16, and Facebook.
Physics Experiment Roundup: The Tevatron at Fermilab hasn't been operational since 2011, but analysis of data from its detectors continues. Recently, physicists analyzing data from the DZero detector announced that they have discovered a new four-flavor particle, the tetraquark. See this Fermilab article for more technical details about the tetraquark.
Resources: Do the mysterious scribbles of Feynman diagrams keep you scratching your head? Then check out Don Lincoln's recent video about them, and learn the basics about these diagrams. Ever heard of a sterile neutrino? Learn more about this even sneakier neutrino possibility in this symmetry article.
Just for Fun: A nice photo this week from Fermilab . . . reflection of Wilson Hall on car at sunset. (Photo from Fermilab This Week, Valery Stanley)
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - February 26, 2016
Spotlight on the Iowa QuarkNet Center: The QuarkNet center at the University of Iowa has an intensive workshop every other summer. This was not one of those years, but they did some great work all the same in summer research. One of the highlights was building models of CMS with a 3D printer. Read how it is done.
News from QuarkNet Central: Fermilab-based masterclasses began yesterday with Rochester on CMS and continue today with Stillwater and St. Louis on ATLAS and Honolulu on CMS. View the whole schedule and then scroll down to meet our Fermilab masterclass moderators.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Daya Bay is an experiment in China to study neutrinos generated by a nuclear reactor. Now they've made the most precise measurements yet of the energy spectrum and they've found a surprise.
Resources: Particle physics ABC, easy as Z to ee; check it out in symmetry. Also . . . neutrinos are hard to see; look how they do it in a TPC.
Just for Fun: Sometimes it is all about getting the right degree as in XKCD.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - February 19, 2016
Spotlight on the Colorado State University QuarkNet Center: In its fourth year, the CSU center is relatively new. Dr. Bob Wilson, Cherie Bornhorst and about six local teachers have learned about cosmic rays, building and deploying cosmic ray detectors, worked with LHC data, and involved students through the study of cosmic ray detectors and participation in the masterclass. During the summer 2015 workshop, with the help of Ken Cecire and Dave Trapp, participants took advantage of local elevation changes to study changes in cosmic ray muon flux with elevation from 4.900 feet (in Fort Collins) to 12.100 feet (in Rocky Mountain National Park).
News from QuarkNet Central: Get the word about your upcoming masterclass out to your students! QuarkNet has color posters you can print in 11x17 or 8.5x11. Put one up in your school—or more than one. And send word out to your local media by adapting from the IMC press release template.
It's not too early to begin planning summer workshops! Mentors and lead teachers, consider offering your local teachers an LHC data workshop, CMS e-Lab workshop, or cosmic workshop. These tried and tested two- or three-day workshops give teachers a chance to try out classroom activities, work with real data, and collaborate with other teachers in order to plan classroom implementation. QuarkNet staff or fellows are available to travel to your center to facilitate one of these workshops. For more information or to plan one of these workshops, contact your QuarkNet Central main point of contact.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Need to rent space a half-mile underground? You're in luck! The Soudan Underground Mine in northern Minnesota will have two large underground spaces soon available as the two experiments that have been there for years—MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) and CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search)—wind down operation. While some experiments are winding down, others are just ramping up! The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) now has a working prototype running that researchers are testing as they plan to build the huge liquid argon detector a mile underground in South Dakota's Sanford Underground Research Facility. For more . . . check out this recent symmetry article about DUNE.
Resources: With just a little over a week since the LIGO announcement on the detection of gravitational waves, many teachers are looking for resources to help explain this discovery to their students. Ken Cecire has put together a page with links to all sorts of resources on gravitational waves . . . check it out!
Interested in running the Eratosthenes experiment with your students on the spring equinox? Register online to have your students work with others at a similar longitude.
Just for Fun: Are you a fan of Star Wars and Calvin and Hobbes? Then check out these creations by artist Brian Kesinger where The Force Awakens is reimagined as Calvin and Hobbes. And . . . a little wave-particle humor brought to you by xkcd.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: MarkRAdams74@gmail.com
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - February 12, 2016
Spotlight on the LIGO e-Lab: You may be a user of the Cosmic Ray e-Lab or of the CMS e-Lab, but have you tried the LIGO e-Lab? Gravitational waves can make only the most miniscule vibrations in the LIGO interferometer arms at Hanford and at Livingston. Thus isolating out background vibrations—seismic activity—is paramount. The detectors used to measure that seismic background generate the data in the LIGO e-Lab that students can use to study wave propagation, earthquakes, and even simple x = vt problems. To learn more contact Dale Ingram.
News from QuarkNet Central: International Masterclasses have begun! The first videoconference was at CERN yesterday, and we pick them up at Fermilab on February 25—just about two weeks away. If you have a masterclass at your center, be sure you have an orientation and Vidyo test; masterclass leaders can contact Ken Cecire. If you'd like to have one, contact Ken about that; there are a few slots open! And please let your students know that they can follow it all on Twitter, @physicsIMC and #LHCIMC16, and Facebook.
Physics Experiment Roundup: NABBED! LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, has detected gravitational waves. LIGO was designed to search for gravitational waves, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. In this first-ever observation, violently colliding black holes over a billion light-years away created an infinitesimal space-time disturbance here on Earth, which gave a telltale chirp in LIGO. The article on the BBC website explains it quite nicely. For a more technical view, try the announcement on Interactions.org, which also has a link to the Physical Review Letters article. Welcome to the era of Higgs bosons and gravitational waves! And congratulations, LIGO collaboration!
Resources: Check out this video explanation of the LIGO discovery by Brian Greene. Miss the webcast of the big announcement? Here it is.
Just for Fun: Ever seen those nifty Art Deco old travel posters from the 1920s? Well, NASA has updated them for the 2120s. Still like Calvin and Hobbes? (Who doesn't?) Here's their take on dark matter.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: MarkRAdams74@gmail.com
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - February 5, 2016
Spotlight on the Rice University/University of Houston QuarkNet Center: This center had a very busy 2015 with "Saturday Physics" events, student research internships, and a weeklong teacher workshop. The six "Saturday Physics" events took place during the school year, featuring talks by professors for high school students and teachers on a variety of topics from lunar solar power to the physics of sound and music. Thirteen teachers attended the weeklong teacher workshop in June, which included talks given by professors on their research in addition to time working with cosmic ray muon detectors. By the end of the workshop, teachers had six detectors up and running. Two teachers and eight students were involved with more long-term summer work, participating in six-week or eight-week-long research internships. This center also sent Julia Bell and Linda Bazard to Data Camp at Fermilab in July of 2015.
News from QuarkNet Central: The CMS masterclass has a new event display, iSpy-webGL. You can try it out here or watch a screencast about it by Zachary Going, a former masterclass student who now studies physics at Tufts University. More progress! CMS masterclass documentation is complete and can be found at this link. The CMS masterclass web pages have new features for 2016, including adaptation of the WZH-path to the new event display and a new translation into Turkish. It is not quite ready for the IMC site yet, but you can have a sneak preview on the development server. Contact Ken Cecire if you have questions.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model, the MoEDAL experiment at CERN has been taking data now for nearly a year, and includes contributions from 20 high school students from the UK. Physicists at Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) use muonium to look for antigravity, as described in this Guardian article. Scientists at Berkeley National Laboratory create the first-ever, two-stage laser-plasma accelerator powered by independent laser pulses.
Resources: Learn how to discover weird new particles with this video from MinutePhysics. Fermilab's Don Lincoln discusses the idea of quantum gravity; describing gravity at a quantum level continues to elude physicists today.
Just for Fun: Love to build or fly paper airplanes? This site has information on experiments you can perform with paper airplanes, challenges for your students, and even an official contest into which you may enter.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: MarkRAdams74@gmail.com
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - January 29, 2016
Spotlight on the University of California, Riverside QuarkNet Center: This group is and should be known for its great participation in International Masterclasses. Not only were they an early adopter—Mark Bonnard traveled to Portugal to cement a relationship with institutes there—but they are still going strong. Last year, they expanded the program as part of university outreach to community college students. Undergraduate Connor Richards won an award to expand it to a yearlong tutoring program. Meanwhile, UC Riverside jumped back into the thick of the cosmic ray collaboration with a three-day workshop in July facilitated by Rose Emmanuel and Elisa Gatz.
News from QuarkNet Central: Important! QuarkNet plans to transfer the entire e-Lab website from servers at Argonne National Lab to new servers at the University of Notre Dame over this weekend, January 30-31, 2016. All processes will be halted and servers will not be available. When the transition is complete, everything should appear exactly the same as before to users. The URL remains the same: (https://www.i2u2.org).
Our two reminders from last week still apply:
(1) Masterclass season is quickly approaching; centers involved need to either have an orientation (if new to masterclass) or an orientation update (if an experienced masterclass center). Leaders, register for an orientation or update (at least a week before your preferred date) using the Google form. Any questions . . . contact Ken Cecire.
(2) Applications for U.S. teachers are due on January 31 for the CERN High School Teacher Program.
Physics Experiment Roundup: When is a vacuum not a vacuum? Learn how nature still abhors a vacuum in symmetry. However, no one abhors data (or they shouldn't). So . . . thanks, the Dark Energy Survey!
Resources: CERN has just completed its new Microcosm exhibit. Watch it build. And here is a sneak preview of the new International Masterclasses poster for students. (Thanks, Cyndi, for the idea. Thanks, Lotta, for the graphic arts.)
Just for Fun: Will you be in northern Illinois this Sunday? Have children (or think like one)? Head to Fermilab! Feeling a little more old-school? Then see how physicists measured time dilation with cosmic rays the old-fashioned way.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: MarkRAdams74@gmail.com
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu
Friday Flyer - January 22, 2016
Spotlight on the Johns Hopkins University QuarkNet Center: The JHU center had an active year in 2015, including a teacher workshop that took place from July 20-24, student research that ran from June 30 - August 9, and involvement in the 2015 CMS Masterclass. During the workshop, teachers participated in both a CMS data and CMS e-Lab workshop, worked through activities in QuarkNet's Data Portfolio, discussed classroom implementation and heard talks from teachers and JHU professors. Nine students participated in the summer research and studied a variety of topics, including a muon lifetime study and muon flux studies using the cosmic ray muon detectors.
News from QuarkNet Central: Two reminders this week:
(1) Masterclass season is quickly approaching; centers involved need to either have an orientation (if new to masterclass) or an orientation update (if an experienced masterclass center). Leaders, register for an orientation or update (at least a week before your preferred date) using the Google form. Any questions . . . contact Ken Cecire.
(2) Applications for U.S. teachers are due on January 31 for the CERN High School Teacher Program.
Physics Experiment Roundup: The Dark Energy Survey, now in its third year operating the Dark Energy Camera, recently released early data creating the largest-yet dark matter mass map. On the neutrino front, first results recently submitted for publication from the NOvA experiment provide hints about the pattern of neutrino masses and the possibility that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently.
Resources: Is the neutrino its own antiparticle? A recent Symmetry article explores this fundamental question about these elusive particles. A Speed Trap for Dark Matter discusses the use of X-ray sources in the universe to identify dark matter signals; and, lastly, a prediction for six science mysteries that might be solved in 2016.
Just for Fun: Think it's fun to get up early in the morning? With the relatively rare opportunity to see the five planets visible to the naked eye in the sky simultaneously, you just might think so, whether you're a morning person or not! This New York Times article tells you how to view this "celestial spectacle."
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: MarkRAdams74@gmail.com
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu