Friday Flyer - January 24, 2025
Spotlight on the Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center
Virginia Tech is a rural center with a long reach in Virginia and so keeps quite active. After participating in Lead Teacher Camp at SURF last spring, Lead Teacher Rebecca Jaronski successfully recruited a group of new teachers from far and wide in 2024. Prof. Tommy O'Donnell mentored the Virginia Tech QuarkNet meeting last summer, which included an introduction to QuarkNet for new teachers and a talk by Prof. O'Donnell on the CUORE experiment at Gran Sasso in Italy that searches for neutrinoless double beta decay, evidence that neutrinos would be their own antiparticles. (Not there yet.) LHC fellows Joel Klammer and Jeremy Wegner came in as well to facilitate a special relativity workshop. Prof. Tatsu Takeuchi gave a talk on relativity which drew on his book An Illustrated Guide to Relativity. Prof. Takeuchi is President of the Chesapeake Section of AAPT. Rebecca gave a presentation on QuarkNet at the Chesapeake Section meeting at Jefferson Lab in fall 2024.
In related news, Rebecca also became a Neutrino fellow in 2024 and Carmen White—new to teaching and new to QuarkNet, having been Rebecca's student teacher last spring—represented Virginia Tech at Data Camp 2024.
News from QuarkNet Central
Mentors! RFP! The due date for centers to respond to the Quarket Request for Proposals (RFP) is January 30 - just six days away. Mentors and lead teachers, please fill out the Summer 2025 RFP response form soon so we can allocate funds for your center activities.
Fermilab-based International Masterclasses 2025: Has your center registered for International Masterclasses yet? It is getting late, but we still have time! We still have a (reduced) number of slots, so check out the Fermilab masterclass videoconference schedule and pick an open date or time. Need some prep for tutors and teachers or just a brush up? A Masterclass Orientation can help. To register for a masterclass date or an orientation, email Ken or Shane. Want more information? Read the latest circular that came out today and last week's edition as well. Circulars will now be weekly into February and March.
Beamline for Schools (BL4S): BL4S is a global competition for high school students offering winning teams the unique opportunity to conduct their own physics experiment at a CERN beamline. Check out the BL4S website for more information.
QuarkNet Educational Discussions (QED): The next meeting will be on Wednesday, February 19 at 8:00pm EST. Our guest will be Dr. Ramon E. Lopez, speaking about the Quantum for All Students and Teachers Project he directs. If you have any questions about QED, including how to join, contact Charlie Payne (paynec@ncssm.edu).
Cosmic Rays: Students from Chicago-area schools using the QuarkNet detector went with cosmic ray fellow Nate Unterman and UIC QuarkNet teacher Marybeth Senser to the AAPT Winter Meeting this week to present posters and talks on their research. One of the posters won a Society of Physics Students honorable mention—the only pre-university poster to do so. Take a look at our folder of images from the events.
Opportunities coming up soon (H/T Adam LaMee):
- January 28 - The application opens for the STEP UP 2025-26 Advocates cohort. Stipend and in-person training are offered for teachers in the Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City areas.
- January 31 - Apply to the LIGO International Physics and Astronomy (IPA) program for educators, a one-week in-person program geared towards high school educators from around the world. IPA will take place in Richland, WA July 13-19.
- February 12 - Another application opens for the STEP UP Everyday Actions PLC. There are stipends and a virtual summit for pre-service and in-service teachers.
- February 15 - Learn about publishing in the American Journal of Physics and The Physics Teacher hosted by OPTYCs.
- March 1 - Apply to be a PhET Fellow. This is for K-12 educators based in Title 1 and CEP public schools in the U.S.
Physics Experiment Roundup
We start with the future: a new lab. Canada's TRIUMF and France's CNRS have, according to Interactions, teamed up to start a new international laboratory, NPAT, in Vancouver. Meanwhile, theorists can team up, too: we read in APS Physics that the Max Planck Institute and Rice University physicists propose a new kind of particle that is neither fermion nor boson. They call it a paraparticle, a particle which has quantum states that can flip one to another when its position changes. This may also yield a new class of physics puns. And if that is not heavy enough for you, APS Physics also reports the discovery at GSI in Germany of a new superheavy nucleus, rutherfordium-252. Last but not least, CERN Bulletin gives us the LHC Accelerator Report.
Resources
Now we start with the past. CERN Bulletin provides with highlights of the 70th year of CERN, just concluded, while APS Physics enables us to reach all the way back to 1916 and Millikan's measurement of Planck's Constant. As for the rest: it's video day! We have a new Don Lincoln video on how and why we get argon from the air for neutrino experiments. Then there is a really nice visual explanation of particle physics with Feynman diagrams from Arvin Ash along with a geometric explanation (interpretation?) of that much-loved, not-at-all-confusing particle property called spin, thanks to ScienceClic English.
Just for Fun
Parodies of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire have been popping up all over YouTube. So, in the most recent Editorial Board meeting here at One Friday Flyer Plaza, we wasted valuable time watching a bunch of these videos that might vaguely be related to physics. Thus we have We Didn't Start Our Science from Rockin' Science Videos and We're learning AP Physics by the students of a one Mr. Zim. We also find a Star Wars version (of course) and another Star Wars version (really?).
After this, the Editorial Board found they'd had enough of the same music so we defaulted to XKCD and learned about radon, altitude, and how to irritate our chemistry colleagues. It was a good meeting.
QuarkNet Staff
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Spencer Pasero: spasero@fnal.gov
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu