QuarkNet an der Elbe: Away Team

I'm at CERN for the International Particle Physics Outreach Group meeting. I'm writing this in the interstices.

First off, I'm sorry for not posting last week. It was in many ways a quiet week in the office at IKTP; when you think about it, that is nifty in its own way.

This week has been more on-the-go. I rented a car and drove here to CERN in the early part of the week. (After two months of all public transport, it was nice to drive again!) Arriving on Wednesday, I immediately raced to a special masterclass with about 45 students visiting from Italy. We tried out an early beta of CIMA, CMS Instrument for Masterclass Analysis, for the first time. CIMA will replace our old online spreadsheets. We still have work to do but the bottom line is: it works. Students were able to enter data, combine results, and get a mass plot without some of the bottlenecks we'd run into before. And, yes, the Italian students, teachers, and physicists were great.

One of the great things about IPPOG is who comes. Many great colleagues are here, to numerous to name. One of the folks you might know is Jeff Rodriguez, who is lead teacher for the Cincinnati QuarkNet center and a Cosmic Ray fellow. He is at this particular meeting to explain International Muon Week and join in on some of the discussion of this and International Cosmic Day. Jeff's students participate in the LHCb masterclass and Jeff met LHCb physicists and was able to go tsee the detector with them. QuarkNet spokesperson Marge Bardeen is co-Chair of IPPOG and she is here as well. Call us the QuarkNet "away team" at IPPOG.* 

Students at CERN build a mass plot in CIMA.

Jeff Rodriquez "in the pit" at the LHCb detector.