Well-written Annual Report

The JHU Experimental Particle Physics Group sponsored its annual QuarkNet Workshop in the Bloomberg Center the week of August 4-8. This is the 7th year JHU has been part of the national  QuarkNet  program.  This  year’s workshop included 13 teachers, nine of whom had been in the program before. The teachers came from a wide variety of backgrounds. There were both  male and female teachers representing Balti- more City and non-Baltimore City schools, public and private schools, sin- gle  sex  and  regular  schools,  as  well secular and religious schools.

The workshop format was talks in the morning and “lab” in the afternoon. The talks ranged beyond just experimental and theoretical particle physics, including the WMAP experiment, cosmology, condensed matter physics, superconductivity and global warming. Speakers from the JHU faculty and research staff included Bruce Barnett, Bill Blair, Chia Ling  Chien,  Andrei  Gritsan,  David Kaplan, David Larson, Petar Maksimovic and Raman Sundrum. One of the high school teachers, James Rittner, made two presentations, one on particle physics and the other on his experience at CERN as a QuarkNet teacher representative. The afternoon labs included a lot of variety. The lab for the first two days was led by a QuarkNet teacher from Kansas, Laurie Cleavenger, in collabora- tion with Pauline Oji, a JHU QuarkNet teacher. The lab for the last three days was led by James Rittner and Bruce Barnett. There were two primary activities: 1) introduction to the EPPOG Master- class program and particle physics data analysis and 2) assembly of one of the QuarkNet cosmic ray detectors. Time was allocated for the teachers to discuss other ways to get their students more interested in science. JHU particle physicists along with three of the teachers and their students joined an international masterclass program in the spring of 2007. The other teachers found this to be very interesting and expressed a desire to include their students in 2008. Also, there was in- creasing enthusiasm from the teachers in becoming more involved in  the  2008  Johns  Hopkins Physics Fair.

Mentors: Bruce Barnett, Morris Swartz