Notre Dame QuarkNet Center Annual Report 2023
The Notre Dame center had another busy year. We had a full schedule of our regular Monday afternoon hybrid meetings which entailed preparation of a large number of initiatives. Jeremy Wegner and his students from Winamac Community High School participated in World Wide Data Day and International Cosmic Day in November 2022 and in a CMS masterclass at Notre Dame in March. Students from St. Joseph High School participated remotely. In February, Pat Mooney and Caroline Fletcher exhibited an e/m apparatus and a cloud chamber at Science Alive! in the St. Joseph Public Library. Rebekah Randall and her students at Canterbury High School participated in International Muon Week in February and one of Rebekah's students also came to the masterclass at Notre Dame.
Notre Dame hosted the QuarkNet Lead Teacher Camp in the beginning of June, with Jeff Chorny and Jeremy Wegner representing ND. Dan Walsh and Pat Mooney also helped to show visiting fellows around the ND campus.
Summer at Notre Dame has always been busy with student-teacher-mentor research outside the pandemic years and 2023 was no exception. Teacher and students did Cosmic Ray Studies with the QuarkNet Cosmic Ray Muon Detector, the Cosmic Watch (CW), and Project GRAND. The Digital Visualization Theater group is in the middle of updating computer hardware and software but also branched out substantially into VR. Other projects included Astrophysics, magnetic phenomena, building and testing CO2 sensors (with Indiana University South Bend), and CMS Data. CMS Data extended out past Notre Dame with remote participation in the CMS Open Data Workshop at Fermilab. Cosmic Ray Studies also ventured out with an online poster and a proceedings paper for the International Cosmic Ray Conference 2023 and preparation of a talk for the African Conference on Fundamental and Applied Physics 2023.
It should also be noted that Rebekah Randall, Jeremy Wegner, and Dan Kallenberg are QuarkNet fellows and were available to facilitate workshops nationwide in the summer. In particular, Jeremy went to the Brookhaven/Stony Brook center and Rebekah went to Purdue.
Jeremy Wegner and his students in the CMS Masterclass at Notre Dame.
Notre Dame QuarkNet Symposium, July 28.