Friday Flyer - April 24, 2015
Spotlight on the Top Quark: It has been 20 years now since the top quark was discovered at Fermilab. You can recreate some of the excitement of 1995 with a QuarkNet activity that enables your students to use the physics you teach anyway, like conservation laws and vector addition, along with E = mc2 to calculate the mass of the top quark from DZero events. You can find Calculate the Top Quark Mass in the QuarkNet Data Portfolio. It should take a class period or so and, at this time of year, can provide excellent review along with some still-cutting-edge physics.
News from QuarkNet Central: Still thinking about what to do in your summer workshop? QuarkNet offers ready-to-roll workshops and facilitators for them: the Cosmic Ray e-Lab and Detector Workshop, the CMS e-Lab Workshop, and Data Workshops in several flavors. Please contact Bob Peterson for the cosmic workshop and Ken Cecire about the latter two.
In way cool news, take a look at what Notre Dame lead teacher (and former staff member) Pat Mooney and Notre Dame physicist Adam Martin were doing in Chile earlier this year with masterclasses and more.
Physics Experiment Roundup: The construction of the Mu2e Experiment, which will look for theorized rare direct conversions of muons to electrons (no neutrinos! beyond the Standard Model!), broke ground at Fermilab last weekend. See the groundbreaking video here. On the other side of the world, it turns out the LHC is not the only major accelerator that is restarting: so is J-PARC, the 50-GeV electron accelerator in Japan. Here is an article all about it.
Resources: Video on Complex Dark Matter from Don Lincoln
Just for Fun: If you don't trust physicists . . . a cute YouTube video from NPR
QuarkNet Staff Teachers:
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Bob Peterson: rspete@fnal.gov