Vanderbilt University QuarkNet Center
Submitted by kcecire
on Wednesday, July 10, 2013 - 19:39
The Vanderbilt QuarkNet Center has an active cosmic ray research program as well as week-long summer workshops under the leadership of mentor Bill Gabella.
Description
Nashville area QuarkNet teachers working on cosmic ray and particle physics.
Vanderbilt QuarkNet Worskhop 2018
25-29 June 2018
Links of Interest:
Vanderbilt QuarkNet Site: http://www.hep.vanderbilt.edu/~gabellwe/qnweb/
Vanderbilt QuarkNet “Drupal” group page: http://quarknet.i2u2.org/group/vanderbilt-university-quarknet-center
DRAFT/TEST - Vanderbilt University QuarkNet 2017 Annual Report
Personnel
The Vanderbilt University QuarkNET group is mentored by William (Bill) Gabella, which much help from emeritus mentor Medford Webster and a volunteer teacher Terry King. We advise the teachers and students on the use of the Cosmic Ray Muon Detectors (CRMDs), we maintain them, and we help with either setup of our loaned out CRMDs or with those that are permanently at the school. We also host the 5 day summer workshop for the teachers.
2017 Annual Report - Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University QuarkNet 2016
Personnel
The Vanderbilt University QuarkNET group is mentored by William (Bill) Gabella, which much help from emeritus mentor Medford Webster and a volunteer teacher Terry King. We advise the teachers and students on the use of the Cosmic Ray Muon Detectors (CRMDs), we maintain them, and we help with either setup of our loaned out CRMDs or with those that are permanently at the school. We also host the 5 day summer workshop for the teachers.
Vanderbilt CMS Data Agenda
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.
Agenda
Times and specific activities are subject to adjustment.
Thursday 27 July09:00 Coffee, Registration 09:15 Introduction/Objectives/Overview/Data Portfolio 09:30 Level 1 Data Portfolio Activities: 10:30 Break 10:45 Level 2 Data Portfolio Activity 11:45 Reflection on Activities 12:00 Lunch 13:00 Level 1 Data Portfolio Activity 14:00 Break 14:15 Level 2 Data Portfolio Activity: 14:45 MasterClass Intro 15:15 Reflections on Activities and Discussion 16:00 End of Day |
Friday 28 July09:00 Coffee/Recap of Yesterday/Plan for Today 09:15 Level 2 Data Portfolio Activity CMS Masterclass Measurement Introduction 09:45 CMS measurement 10:45 Break 11:00 Guest Speaker Chuck Higgins (MTSU), Radio Astronomy and Radio Jove 12:00 Lunch 13:00 Continue CMS measurement 14:00 MasterClass Wrap-up 14:30 Reflection and Discussion Implementation Plans/How to Use 15:00 Evaluation and Close Participant Satisfaction Survey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NV726DM - http://tiny.cc/qnps17 |
Resources |
Contacts |
Vanderbilt 2016
Vanderbilt University QuarkNet 2016
Personnel
The Vanderbilt University QuarkNET group is mentored by William (Bill) Gabella, which much help from emeritus mentor Medford Webster and a volunteer teacher Terry King. We advise the teachers and students on the use of the Cosmic Ray Muon Detectors (CRMDs), we maintain them, and we help with either setup of our loaned out CRMDs or with those that are permanently at the school.
Cosmic Ray Muon Detectors
The Vanderbilt QuarkNET has three conventional cosmic ray muon detectors and one "unconventional" one---it has smaller scintillator paddles. The one with the small scintillators is most useful for looking at attenuation of the muon flux with materials, like water, or bricks, stacked between pairs of scintillators. These are routinely loaned to our high school teachers for their club and classroom work. Starting a few years ago, our most active high schools now have their own CRMDs, with four sets in the area.
This year Meaghan Berry's research class borrowed two of the loaners and later setup the one they received from Fermilab. She ran two (or more) research groups on these detectors. And one of the groups presented their results to the Science Club of Nashville, an organization of mostly young professionals with a history in science or technology or currently working in science or technology or just interested. The four high school students did an excellent job presenting the CRMD, which they setup and ran as a demo, and their research with it. They attempted to correlate pressure and temperature with muon flux with a null result. Still they did a very good job presenting cosmic rays, the resulting muons, a nd the detection with the CRMDs. Their presentation was very well received.
Summer Workshop 25-29 July 2016
Following our tradition, we had several talks by local experts, on the LHC, CMS physics and computing, Mapping the Universe, and the CMS Forward Pixel upgrade. Thanks to Andrew Melo, Andreas Berlind, and Will Johns for the very interesting talks and discussion. Bill talked after lunch introducing Gravitational Waves, mostly about the sources and the nature of the Quadrupole formula for gravitational radiation.
Tuesday and Wednesday were all about the LIGO eLab---looking at the data from the Hanford and Livingston seismometers. Ken Cecire from Notre Dame and national QuarkNet led the two day workshop. It was interesting to correlate data with earthquakes, thunderstorms, and other events. Checkout the "agenda" link below and especially the "Info on frequency bands" that appears. This is from Dale Ingram who also gave us and two other institutions a virtual tour of Hanford LIGO. We also had a virtual tour of LIGO Hanford and were joined by several other QuarkNET Workshops.
Thursday was all about a day trip to Marshall Space Flight Center (and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center) in Huntsville, AL. We were hosted by Scott Anderson, who looks like a great contact for teachers---free stuff was mentioned as well as teacher space camps with the possibility of funding/grants to attend! We heard from Trey Cate, the deputy communications person, about the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's new heavy lift vehicle. He discussed the distant retrograde orbit on the far-side of the moon for construction of the Mars space craft and rocket. He also discussed the Orion crew module that can sit on top of the SLS. We had a bus tour after lunch to see Marshall itself and hear about the history. One stop was the Payload Operations and Integration Center, where we visitors could look at operators in the control room guiding and monitoring science experiments on the International Space Station.
Friday seemed to be all about throwing bottles of water that had a leaking hole cut in their sides. But actually it started with Terry King guiding us through the construction of two fun LIGO/Gravitation demos...the spandex warped spacetime, and the tennis ball merging like blackholes. Very Fun! We also assembled the Cosmic Ray Muon Detector and looked at the Equip program, to refresh our memories. The last thing we did was to throw leaking water bottles at Bill and Meaghan from a spiral staircase. By-the-way, they do not leak the whole time...something to do with the equivalence principle.
Great Week! Thanks to our speakers, to Ken, and to the teachers that make it interesting.
The Monday and Tuesday talks for Vanderbilt QuarkNet 2016 can be found here especially other formats, and linked below.
Gabella's Welcome .
Gabella's LHC talk .
Melos's CMS Physics and Computing .
Berlind's Mapping the Universe .
John's CMS Forward Pixel Upgrade.
Gabella's Gravitational Waves, Sources .
Cecire's agenda for the VU Workshop.
Gabella's LIGO and Saulson's Description of Light Stretching .
LIGO's Educators page, and the last link for the Educator's Guide.
Bill's iPhone shots includes Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with Ken Cecire, fun with the interferometer, and Thursday in Huntsville.
Bill's camera shots with the virtual tour of Hanford LIGO and the interferometer, as well as Huntsville. Includes a picture or two of Scott Anderson.
Scott's pictures while we were touring the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Hunstville, AL. Gallery has the full resolution pictures if you keep clicking on them.
Other Links of Interest
Local web page http://www.hep.vanderbilt.edu/~gabellwe/qnweb
Facebook group page https://www.facebook.com/groups/682323215235912/
Vanderbilt QuarkNET Page (drupal, i.e. here) /group/vanderbilt-university-quarknet-center
Top QuarkNET i2u2 page /
[Written and edited by Bill Gabella 20160907]
Updated Vanderbilt Quarknet Web Page
Check out http://www.hep.vanderbilt.edu/~gabellwe/qnweb/ to see a descrition of our QuarkNet 2016 week, as well as some pictures.
LIGO e-Lab workshop at Vanderbilt
July 26-27, 2016
Objectives
Participating teachers will be able to use the LIGO e-Lab to:
- Plot and interpret data recorded by LIGO seismic instruments
- Explain the importance of LIGO seismic data in gravitational wave search
- Identify and list classical physics concepts in LIGO data analysis
- Develop a plan for use of the LIGO e-Lab in the classroom.
Agenda
Times and specific activities are subject to adjustment.
Tuesday July 2609:00 Coffee, Registration 09:15 Introduction
09:45 Break 10:00 LIGO Hanford Virtual Visit 10:30 Gravitational Waves presentation 1130 Videos: 12:00 Lunch 13:00 Interferometer activity 14:00 Exploration of LIGO e-Lab:
15:00 Break 15:15 Search and analyze in data:
16:30 End of Day
|
Wednesday July 2709:00 Coffee/Reflection
09:15 Begin resreach
10:30 Break 10:45 Continue research 11:30 Create posters 12:00 Lunch 14:00 Poster presentations 14:30 Wrap-up
15:00 End of workshop |
Resources |
Contacts |
2015 Annual Report - Vanderbilt University
The Vanderbilt University QuarkNet program continues to loan any offour cosmic ray muon detectors (CRMDs) and to support the use of CRMDs in the classroom for many high school teachers in the Middle Tennessee region, including Bowling Green, Kentucky. Dr. William Gabella is the mentor, with much aid and support from Dr. Med Webster, the emeritus mentor, and from Terry King, a part-time college and high school physics teacher who recently retired after 30 years experience teaching physics full-time at the high school level.
In 2015, we continued our summer workshop as a scaled-down effort (without travel) focused mostly on the CRMDs, with enrichment in particle physics, astronomy, and astrophysics, and usually some slightly out-of-the-box fun event. The previous year we toured several venues in Middle Tennessee that would be useful for teachers to know about for field trips, enrichment, and science fair ideas for their classrooms. And in 2015, we hosted a summer class of very bright high school students and discussed cosmic rays and the CRMDs and took the students through a speed-of-muons experiment.
In 2014, two of our QuarkNet teachers received their own CRMDs. For the Vanderbilt University QuarkNet program this was novel. This continued in 2015 with two more of our teachers receiving permanent CRMDs for their high schools. This gives the area 7 standard CRMDs, as well as the one with smaller scintillators best used for attenuation experiments.
Also in early 2015, Dr. Gabella was able to arrange for Vanderbilt University to kindly permanently loan the program 4 older, retired laptops. They were in decent condition, but with their hard drives completely wiped. Dr. Gabella installed Fedora Linux on them, Sun Java, and the drivers to run the EQUIP data acquisition and control program. The laptops made moving the CRMDs around much easier, replacing much older, even vintage, desktop computers. Though the OS is Linux, it has tools that look a lot like those on Windows machines that high school students have the greatest familiarity. Also the laptops' desktops were setup identically to each other, and to have icons for the usual programs: running EQUIP, file browsing to the EQUIP data directory, and to Firefox and Google Chrome browsers.
This also was a solution to the problem of trying to install the necessary drivers and software on high school computers which are usually centrally administered with teachers having very little, or no, privilege on them. It also showed that a free OS can be used with older computer platforms with modern Sun Java to run EQUIP.
Dr. Gabella also has the LabVIEW source code for the LabVIEW acquisition and control program, but has not made it work in a robust way with modern LabVIEW (version 2014) and under Linux. Though this should be possible. The LabVIEW program developed by University of Washington, has some useful graphic indicators and the ability to save the timing data in spreadsheet form.
Some minor problems with the CRMDs have come up, a bad photomultiplier tube in one case, a bad GPS in another. Dr. Webster has been indispensable in diagnosing these hardware issues and Dave Hoppert at Fermilab has been very good and timely at helping us fix these problems.
In 2014-15, we loaned out the detectors to three schools which typically will keep the CRMDs for many months or a whole semester. This allows the teacher time to remember the CRMD operation, and to demonstrate and then cycle through students running the detectors. This last semester, with so many detectors both at Vanderbilt University and in the schools, Ms. Rossberg at mcGavock High School asked for two detectors and had received one for her and her students to build. This creates a novel, for us at least, pedagogy of her having access to enough CRMDs to run them in parallel with many more students at once. We believe this is a good way to use the detectors in schools, and look forward to hearing the results.
We expect more use of the CRMDs in the coming years. We have added two new teachers to our group in existing schools, and another teacher who was active in the Purdue QuarkNet group has moved into the region. We also have several teachers that are interested in the program, but unable to participate fully. We try to enourage, educate, and support them as much as we are able.
During our QuarkNet week this year, we hosted nine teachers for some part of the week, and on Thursday we hosted 11 high school students from a summer program on Cosmology and Large Scale Structure. We had our usual half day of enrichment talks from a Andres Delannoy, particle physics graduate student, and Dr. Rudy Montez, post-doc in astronomy, as well as Dr. Gabella giving the QuarkNet News, and remembering Tom Jordan, and the CMS and LHC updates. The Monday afternoon was spent reviewing Cosmic Rays and the CRMDs and running a quick speed-of-muon experiment---in preparation for hosting the high school students on Thursday.
Tuesday and Wednesday of our week we spent with Bob Peterson. As always, it was good, informative, useful to see him again. He focused on CRMDs in shower mode and the eLab interface, which is not a strong skill in our group.
Thursday we hosted the high school students. Their numbers were small enough that we formed four teams of 3 to 4 students with one CRMD and two teachers. The main goal, or at least the stated goal, was to guide the students through the speed-of-muon experiment analyzing the data offline, using spreadsheets. The speed-of-muon experiment has he all important swapping of the two main detectors to account for the systematic effects of signal timing in the different channels. The students certainly understood that v=D/T, the velocity is the distance between the detectors divided by the time it took the particle to cross. It was a bit of a challenge for them to do the analysis on one set of data and not see a velocity that makes any sense, though sometimes it can be close to the speed-of-light. It is only after using the swapped dataset and the adding the timing together in a certain way that intrinsic timing differences cancel and the speed calculations were usually within 3% of the speed-of-light.
After introducing Cosmic Rays (their instructor Dr. Erika Grundstrom make it part of her lesson plan that week before we met them, using Cosmic Extremes and other materials) and the CRMDs to the students, we tried hard to make the students handle the detector pieces, and run the EQUIP program. We moved files around using Google Docs or thumb drives. The analysis was, for most, done in the Google Docs Sheet program. The students have little or no experience with spreadsheet programs, so that was a challenge but also added to the utility for the students. They also learn very fast and only simple functions are needed. Though many did follow the recipe to make histograms---not so easy in a spreadsheet program.
All-in-all, we thought introducing young students to the mix was quite a good experience, but the QuarkNet teachers, mentors, and the students. We all had fun and it is good to be confronted with those excellent questions from the students. Also the teachers being in a mentor-ing role, similar to, but different than their usual high school experience was a positive. Bob Peterson has mentioned that some QuarkNet groups have as many high school students as teachers during their QuarkNet week. We definitely see the benefit in that.
Friday morning we wrapped up, summarizing the Thursday activity in a document, filling out the survey for QuarkNet teachers, and cleaning up from the Thursday activity. In the afternoon, Dr. Sourish Dutta, and theorist and also our dem
In an effort to try to increase the student enthusiasm, beyond a hard-core number, Dr. Gabella started a Facebook group page for the Vanderbilt University QuarkNet group. Our thinking is that as students do interesting things with the CRMDs they can post, and show off to their friends and family, and maybe eventually to other QuarkNet students around the US and the world. The first challenge is that most teachers do not use Facebook, so it was suggested they create an account just for their science class in high school and not put personal items on it. It remains to be seen if this experiment in social media really works out, but it is a good start.
We have had a good year in the Vanderbilt University QuarkNet group. The slight increase in new people, and more importantly the increase in permanent CRMD setups, are both expected to increase the use and utility of the detectors. The group remains pretty tight and mutually supportive. With Dr. Webster's continued activity and with Mr. Terry King's support, this activity is both manageable and fun.
Facebook Vanderbilt University QuarkNet group page
https://www.facebook.com/groups/682323215235912/
Vanderbilt University QuarkNet self-hosted page
http://www.hep.vanderbilt.edu/~gabellwe/qnweb/
2014 Annual Report - Vanderbilt University
The Vanderbilt group is in the 12th year of managing and organizing, as well as mentoring teachers for the middle Tennessee QuarkNet program. The effort started with Robert Panvini, was put on a firm footing with the leadership of Med Webster, and recently continues with Bill Gabella as the main organizer and mentor.
The Vanderbilt QuarkNet program has about a dozen teachers that routinely attend the QuarkNet week during the summer, or "checkout" the cosmic ray muon detectors during the school year. They comprise various levels of hardware expertise and many lack familiarity with the Cosmic Ray e-Lab functionality of the program. This motivated the invitation for Bob Peterson to visit and give a refresher on the e-Lab this year. The Vanderbilt program presently oversees two cosmic ray muon detectors (CRMDs) permanently being installed in local high schools, and three others for teachers to checkout for part of the academic year. A sixth CRMD exists but has non-standard sized scintillators that is sometimes used for very specific muon studies/demonstrations.
In 2014, Gabella was the principal QuarkNet Mentor though still well aided and supported by Webster. If there was a theme, it was QuarkNet's Cosmic Ray e-Lab, the online facility to store, analyze, and compare the data from the muon detectors. This central repository has data from a great many QuarkNet high schools both in the U.S. and around the world. The Vanderbilt QuarkNet teachers are great at using the CRMDs in the classroom but are less facile with the Cosmic Ray e-lab. To this end, Robert Peterson, once a high school physics teacher now become a QuarkNet teacher coach, visited Vanderbilt for two days to specifically work with the teachers on the e-Lab. The effort finished with teachers creating online presentations about their studies---just as their students would do in a teaching situation. Dr. Ken Cecire, the PI for the QuarkNet program, also visited during the first half of the week. He shared with the teachers the breadth of the current program.
There were excellent talks on CMS status and update plans by Johns, on CMS physics status by Delannoy, and Jennifer Piscionere gave an excellent talk on the controversial Bicep2 result claiming observation of gravity waves from the Big Bang. This nicely tied into the 2012 QuarkNet theme of gravity waves. Gabella talked about the LHC and its upgrades, while Webster discussed the history of measuring the speed-of-light. That afternoon the speed-of-muons was measured using the CRMDs. This helped prepare the teachers for Peterson's lessons on using the e-Lab with the data.
Though budgetary restrictions inhibited a distant trip, the group did visit several local, middle Tennessee venues that might be useful for the teachers to use for both school trips and for possible collaboration on projects for their students. The QuarkNet group spent a full day at the Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory, now an outreach and education facility with an emphasis on astronomy. Dr. Billy Teets and Bob Schweikert gave excellent tours and demonstrations. The teachers made dirty snowball comets, saw a variety of sun dials, visited the artistic camera obscura, saw by eye and by camera live images of a very active sun. Besides the scientific edification, the QuarkNet teachers learned of many opportunities for visits and science activities.
The QuarkNet team also spent a half-day visiting the outreach and education center at the Arnold Engineering and Development Center near Tullahoma, TN. Hosted by Jere Matty, he showed us the array of activities they host, including different levels of robotics, the use of instrumented, small wind tunnels, and many classroom activities. The week finished at the University of Tullahoma Space Institute, where Dr. Bill Hofmeister gave us a tour of the Center for Laser Applications, and a discussion and demonstration of the phase change of water as the air is removed from a vacuum chamber.
There are a dozen active QuarkNet teachers and in any given summer there may be 5-8 that can attend Vanderbilt's QuarkNet week. A relationship with all the teachers continues during the school year, and many of the QuarkNet teachers have been active for years in the program.
In 2013, two of our teachers attended a data analysis program at FNAL. This involved looking at, analyzing, data from the detectors. It was a forerunner of the 2014 ``Data Camp.''
In 2014, one of our teachers Meaghan Berry attended ``Data Camp'' at FNAL and though unable to attend the Vanderbilt program, returned with great enthusiasm and interest. She became the first teacher to checkout a detector for the 2014 academic year.
Middle School Internship Day
Webster and Gabella also host up to four eighth graders each February. This is a middle school internship/career day program, and the students must have expressed an interesting in particle physics or nuclear physics. The Vanderbilt team has received great reviews from the students and the school, as of 2014 having hosted students for 5 years. Webster and Gabella use the QuarkNet muon detectors in a configuration as a telescope, with one pair on the 10th floor and the other pair on the 8th floor, in a stairwell. With three-fold coincidence, the telescope measures the rate and timing of muon hits. With the long baseline and a systematic correction of swapping one of the upper detectors with a lower one, measurements of the muon speed, essentially the speed-of-light, can be better than 3\%.
For the students, they arrive and immediately handle the hardware setting up the first data collection. For that hour, rates are low because of the long baseline, the students hear friendly, somewhat informal, discussions of cosmic rays, muons, and the detector hardware. Webster discusses the history of the speed-of-light measurement, and the need for the swapping an upper scintillator with a lower detector to cancel the systematic delays in the signal from the cabling and electronics. Gabella discusses the analysis of the timing data using Google Docs spreadsheets. Students, who are only somewhat familar with spreadsheets from their school, learn to look for outliers by hand, to set up histograms to find outliers and averages, and to make plots.
Gabella and Webster's goal is for the students to handle hardware, and not be intimidated by it or careless, to run the DAQ computer program, and finally to analyze the data.
Do Performance Plots Reliably Indicate the Blessability of Data?
(first draft)
The purpose of this activity is to provide students with some experience interpreting performance plots and blessing plots. I would assign this activity after students have performed an experiment or two using either data already uploaded by someone else or, if possible, new data taken here with a detector.
1) Show students a performance plot; observe the axis labels and discuss the physical meaning; predict the difference between performance plots from detectors that performed steadily and those that did not.
2) Show students a blessing plot; observe the axis labels and discuss the physical meaning; what does the plot say about how the detector performed?
3) Ask students to propose a way to answer the experimental question; then, provide assistance as needed with navigating around the e-lab site and manipulating the plots for comparison.
4) Conclusion should answer the experimental question in the format: Claim; Evidence; Reasoning
5) Students should create and upload a poster detailing their work and their conclusion.
Here is the link to the poster (thank you for the instructions, Ken!):
I would show that poster to the students only if theirs was waaaay better! It pleases me greatly when they surpass me!