QuarkNet Annual Report 2015

JHU Center

The JHU QuarkNet center had another successful year, involving both high school teachers and students in its activities.  The one-week teacher workshop took place from 20-24 July, and the six-week student internship ran from 30 June to 9 August.  We had several teachers from the JHU center use their cosmic ray muon detectors throughout the year, and our center also participated in the 2015 CMS Masterclass.

1. Teacher Workshop

During the first morning, teachers and students listened to a variety of talks from professors from the Physics & Astronomy department of JHU, as well as a talk from co-lead teacher Kevin Martz. A list of talks, with links, follows:

Dr. Morris Swartz - History of Particle Physics Discoveries

Mr. Kevin Martz - Neutron Diffraction Physics

Dr. Andrei Gristan - Matter in Space & Time 

For the rest of the week, teachers participated in two QuarkNet-hosted workshops: the CMS Data Workshop and the CMS e-lab. Both of these workshops entailed using real data from the LHC CMS experiment to infer properties about particles produced in the proton-proton collisions. See here for a link to the agenda for the week's activities.

In both of the workshops, teachers took advantage of the resources available in the QuarkNet Data Portfolio, an ever-growing set of student-centered activities and curricular resources that are intended to help teachers incorporate particle physics concepts into their classrooms.

2. Student Research
    

9 students (4 from Damascus HS; 5 from Hereford HS) participated in a 6-week summer research internship beginning on 29 June and running to 7 August.  After a short series of introductory activities, students were set loose to pursue research topics of their own choosing.  Alongside this theoretical research, students also designed and conducted experiments with the QuarkNet muon detectors: one group attempted to determine a correlation between muon flux and time of day; another group attempted to determine the mean lifetime of the muon once brought to rest inside the scintillating material.

See our Drupal page for a list of topics, the research abstracts, and PDFs of the summary posters:

Posters:/document/research-posters-2015

The wave-particle duality activity that we did on Monday afternoon was from the Perimeter Institute. Not all materials are available for free on the web, but please investigate their website.

www.perimeterinstitute.ca

July 21-24, 2015

Tiny URL for this page: http://tinyurl.com/qn-cms-jhu15.

CMS Data Workshop

Objectives

Participating teachers will:

• Apply classical physics principles to reduce or explain the observations in data investigations.
• Identify and describe ways that data are organized for determining any patterns that may exist in the data.
• Create, organize and interpret data plots; make claims based on evidence and provide explanations; identify data limitations.
• Develop a plan for taking students from their current level of data use to subsequent levels using activities and/or ideas from the workshop.

We will also provide opportunities to engage in critical dialogue among teaching colleagues about what they learn in the workshop.

Draft Agenda

Times and specific activities are subject to adjustment.

CMS e-Lab Workshop

Objectives

Workshop participants will:

• Identify particles colliding and emerging from collisions at the LHC from CMS data.
• Interpret the physical meaning of plots created from CMS data in light of conservation rules (energy, momentum, charge).
• Ask and answer questions about the physics of high energy collisions using CMS data. 

Agenda

FYI

QuarkNet Annual Report 2014

JHU Center

The JHU QuarkNet center had another successful summer, involving both high school teachers and students in its activities.  The one-week teacher workshop took place from 28 July to 1 August, and the six-week student internship ran from 30 July to 9 August.

1. Teacher Workshop

During the mornings, teachers and students listened to a variety of talks from professors and graduate students from the Physics & Astronomy department of JHU.  See our Drupal site for details and links: /document/list-talks .  Subjects included:

• Particle Physics
  • Mr. J. Smith – Introduction to, and History of, Particle Physics
  • Dr. A. Gritsan  - What is Higgs? A person, a field, a particle, a theory?
  • Dr. P. Maksimovic – The Standard Model and Particle Detectors
  • Dr. J. Kaplan – Higgs and electroweak symmetry breaking Q&A
  • Dr. M. Swartz – The Photoelectric Effect
  • Mr. Kevin Martz – My CERN Summer Vacation
• Astrophysics & Cosmology
  • Dr. J. Krolik – Black Holes
  • Dr. M. Kamionkowski – Cosmic Microwave Background & B-mode Polarization
  • Dr.  T. Essinger-Hileman – The CLASS CMB Polarization Experiment
• Education & Diversity
  • Dr.  R. Leheny – Active Learning in Introductory Physics Education
  • Ms. A. Sady – Diversity Challenges in Physics

In the afternoons, teachers concentrated on designing, constructing and testing a device for quantitative measurement of the photoelectric effect.  See our Drupal page for details: /content/afternoon-activity-2014-workshop-photoelectric-effect-leds

2. Student Research
    

Approximately 11 students (4 from Towson HS, 4 paid and 3 unpaid from Hereford HS) participated in a 6-week summer research internship beginning on 30 July and running to 9 August.After a short series of introductory activities, students were set loose to pursue research topics of their own choosing.Alongside this theoretical research, students also designed and conducted experiments with the QuarkNet muon detector: one group attempted to determine a correlation between muon flux and time of day; another group attempted to determine the mean lifetime of the muon once brought to rest inside the scintillating material.

See our Drupal page for a list of topics, the research abstracts, and PDFs of the summary posters:

Topics: /document/2014-summer-research-abstracts

Posters:/document/2014-jhu-summer-research-list-topics-posters

Antimatter: History, Theory, Detection, and Potential Applications

Shaina Furman (Towson High School), Sylvie Hullinger (Towson High School), James Miller (Towson High School), Jeremy Smith (Hereford High School), Tyler Bradley (Towson High School) , Dr. Morris Swartz (Johns Hopkins University)

The subject of antimatter provides an intriguing field in which physicist can study both the origins of the universe as we know it and research potential medical benefits of exotic particles. Research into potential matter-antimatter asymmetries could shed light on the first few moments after the Big Bang, when matter became a dominant form of mass in the universe and antimatter mysteriously disappeared. This asymmetry, called Charge Parity (CP) violation, would explain why we are able to exist as ordinary matter and why the universe doesn’t consist of a primordial soup of radiation. CP violation can be described in terms of quark mixing probabilities in the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix. Various experiments, including ALPHA and Babar, work to uncover the properties of antimatter that cause CP violation. Antimatter research also has more earthly applications; currently, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) can be used to accurately identify cancerous cells within the body by detecting the high-energy photons that are emitted during electron- positron annihilation. In addition, antiprotons can be fired into tissue in order to irradiate cancerous cells in a precise volume while causing minimal damage to the surrounding healthy tissues. Unfortunately, the cost of antimatter severely limits the development of these processes; currently, one gram of antimatter costs 100 trillion dollars to produce.

The Cosmic Microwave Background

Michael Mistretta (Hereford High School), Jeremy Smith (Hereford High School), Tyler Bradley (Towson High School), Dr. Morris Swartz (Johns Hopkins University)

My research was focused on learning more about the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the information about the early stages of the universe which it contains. I read through various publications regarding the CMB including those from COBE, WMAP, PLANCK, and BICEP-2 to understand what kind of information that can be gained from analyzing the CMB and how these researchers are using these data to refine various theories about the behavior of our universe. The CMB is the afterglow of the Big Bang, it is essentially a snapshot of the universe as it was immediately following the Big Bang and can provide key insight into how the universe became what it is today. Its discovery alone was predicted in the early 60’s by the early Big Bang theories, and once it was discovered it became the smoking gun for the Big Bang theory. NASA’s COBE satellite later found that temperature of the light emitted from the CMB was, although astonishingly uniform, anisotropic to one part in one hundred thousand. COBE was then followed by more advanced telescopes such as WMAP and PLANCK which measured these anisotropies with much more precision. Researchers believe that these slight temperature variations could be a result of density perturbations in the early universe. Recent discovery of b-mode polarization in the radiation emitted by the CMB, as detected by BICEP-2, is believed to be evidence of gravitational waves in the very early stages of the universe, which could potentially provide insight for a refined theory of Cosmic Inflation. Research of the CMB is essential to understanding various aspects of our universe such as inflation, how galaxies and other celestial bodies were formed, and unlocking some of the mysteries of dark matter and energy.