ISU Quarknet Annual Report, 17-20 June 2019 Daily 0800-1130, 1230-1700

17 June:
Teachers arrived and brought their CRMDs. In attendance this year are: Steven Millward, Geoffrey Williams, Keith Quigley, Robert Franckowiak, Enrique Arce-Larreta, and newcomers Enoch Lambert, Jacquelyn Mukherjee, and Benjamin Davis.  Tegan Byerly still has her CRMD. She was active last year, but did not make it to the workshop. Arrangements are being made to get the device since she will be teaching other classes this upcoming year.

Devices were assembled to make sure they were working properly. New students were paired with previous attenders to assist with device preparation and answer individual questions.  Most of the day was used to assemble a complete CRMD. Those who brought their device from last year got their systems running and began to plateau. In the afternoon the newcomers were instructed in plateuaing the devices. The long version and the short version were discussed.

The new teachers got e-lab accounts and installed EQUIP on a Mac, a PC, and Linux. They searched topics to explore.  At 2pm, Robert Roser, formerly of Fermi, now with INL, spoke on the DUNE project and neutrino oscillations.

18 June:
A tour of the QuarkNet site and a introduction to the cosmic e-lab were modeled to show the capabilities and benefits to the teacher and the student. A word of caution was given when creating student groups - make sure you use generic group names, since those will stay on the account in perpetuity. The project map, analysis tools, and blessing were discussed as well as the
Library and Resources links. Enrique shared his experiences with the group and spoke about the CERN opportunity. Another opportunity was to submit to BeamLine for Schools by having students design a plan and send a video to CERN to actually implement the experiment. His students were short listed (they made the top 20).

Time of Flight experiments calculations were discussed as a follow-up to last year’s conversation(s). The geometry upload was discussed to make sure the time stamp in the geometry configuration is previous to the data file that is associated with that geometry. The design of a poster was explained to be used to summarize experiments that are done by students and to be produced by the teacher for the workshop(one explaining their individual experiment and another for a lesson plan).  A discussion was had regarding the coincidence rate, the bias potential, and the number of coincident channels chosen. This relates to the question: Are we all seeing the same thing? Detectors left running for overnight collection of the data.

19 June:
Ken Cecire was on site to discuss Neutrino Masterclass according to schedule listed on Quarknet.i2u2.org ISU agenda. Upload and analysis of data for presentations. Final data collection and uploads from the overnight settings were being done. For the evening, teachers were to work on posters and lesson plans of how they would use the CRMDs in their classrooms. These will be shared tomorrow (Thursday, 20 June) afternoon.

20 June:
We took a tour of a detector lab in the basement, then Ken Cecire continued the Masterclass. A continued look at the cosmic elab took place at the end of Ken’s CMS presentation. The performance study is a valuable tool that allows the plateau to be fine tuned. If collection rates on one channel are optimized at a Time over Thresholds near 20ns, then the other channels
should also peak at the same bin. The counts in each channel will not be the same -y axis- but the max should occur in the same time - x axis. To run the performance study, the e-lab was introduced with the upload procedure discussed and demonstrated.  A final discussion of
(1)  Blessing files from the data uploaded and used as a comparison for future uploads took place and
(2)  pressure adjustments. Also, an additional word of caution regarding power settings on the computers.
There is not just one place to keep the hard drive from shutting down. You need to look for HD sleep and power off configurations. Some laptops, even plugged in will revert to battery power until the battery drains a given amount then begins to recharge. During those times, the computer is in battery mode and may sleep.

The CRMDs were packed up after teachers put the finishing touches on their posters. Teachersthen presented their results and one lesson plan of how the devices would be used in the class.
The assignments for the specific devices were made and included below. Workshop surveyswere sent and completed before the attendees left. 

A follow-up on assigned detectors:
6483 Geoffrey
6606 Enoch
6689 Steve
6780 Enrique
6781 Jaquelyn
6662 Keith
6619 Tegan- Dr.Steve to retrieve
6657 Lafe left at Capstone- Robert to retrieve
6863 Benjamin