This past year, the Purdue QuarkNet Center has been working on rebuilding. September 2022, we started with an afterschool mini-virtual workshop, “What is QuarkNet.” The next event was a World Wide Data Day workshop on a Saturday in October. 

Date: Saturday March 18

Location: Physics and Astronomy Room 238

Small URL for this page: http://cern.ch/go/pd6z.

Agenda (times in ET, subject to change unless in bold)

09:30  Arrival and greetings

10:00  Warm-up

10:15  Introduction to CMS and the Standard Model

This needs to be filled in with some useful content.

1. There are four types of seismic waves: P wave (longitudinal), S wave (transverse), Love wave, and Rayleigh waves.  P and S waves are body waves and go through the Earth.  P waves arrive first.  Love and Rayleigh waves are surface waves, Love waves are transverse and the Rayleigh waves are the most complex and the slowest.

5. Seismic waves are measured using seismometers, which record vibrations in the ground.  One method is to use a drum with a marker attached to a spring-mass system.  To go more old school, the ancient Chinese used a urn with water, that would spill over the mouths of dragons surrounding the urn.  The amount of water indicates the relative strength of th seismic event.  A more modern and advanced seismometer which uses magnets and coils are currently used to measure seismic activity at LIGO.

1.  P and  S waves interior waves.   P--longitudinal, S transverse

Raleigh is a surface wave---rolling action on the transverse wave

Love is a suface wave that slides parallel to the surface.

2.  P penatrates through all layers of the earth.  Refracting at various layers based on density and elascitiy of the medium.

S penatrate only mantel.  Reflecting or being absorbed by the outer core.  So there is a shadow portion of the earth that will not observe the S waves

Raleigh and Love are both surface waves.  So only felt on the surface but propagation is still governed by density and elascitiy of crust and surface features.

Four teachers attended Purdue's 2015 summer workshop which was held June 23-26.  Our lead teacher (Marla Glover) was joined by two new teachers and one returning for a second year.  As we have typically done when working with new teachers, the workshop focused on introducing particle physics concepts and the study of cosmic rays using the QuarkNet cosmic ray detector.  This year we explored some ideas associated with probability and statistics and how these concepts might be taught using measurements made with the cosmic ray detector to provide concrete examples.  In additon, teachers explored the activities on which the MasterClass workshop for high school students are based.  This year we did not visit Fermilab, but did tour the nuclear reactor on the Purdue campus and the tandem Van de Graaff accelerator facility at Purdue's PRIME lab.

In March, Purdue hosted a MasterClass workshop in which 4 students from 2 schools participated.  In addition to the analysis of data from the CMS experiment, the students were given tours of the silicon detector assembly labs at Purdue, at which components for the upgraded CMS Forward Pixel Detector are being assembled.  Later in the spring, lead teacher Marla Glover hosted an additional MasterClass activity at her school in which 12 students from her school shared their findings with students from France.

This summer, Purdue hosted five teachers from Central Indiana for four days, followed by a tour of Fermilab.   Almost all the teachers this year were new to QuarkNet so the workshop emphasized a basic introduction to fundamental particle physics, particle accelerators and cosmic ray physics.   The cosmic ray detectors were used to study coincidence rates under various conditions and these rates were compared with the rate that would have been expected from purely random coincidences in independent counters.  In this way the participants were able to deduce the presence of both cosmic rays and extended air showers and to measure the speed of cosmic rays.  This year, data was collected using both the software interface originally developed at Purdue and the version on which development has continued at Fermilab.  We also went through the CMS MasterClass exercises to illustrate the activities their students would undertake in Spring 2015.  This year, we were fortunate to be visited by Nate Unterman, a QuarkNet fellow from the UIC group who observed the use of the two software interfaces and presented the activities his students have undertaken with the cosmic ray detector at his school.  We were also visited by Prof. Neeti  Parashar from the Calumet campus of Purdue University, who is starting a new QuarkNet center there.  On Friday, the group toured the D0 detector and the MINOS detector at Fermilab.