Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center
Submitted by erust
on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 - 13:19
Teachers working with mentors from Virginia Tech's Center for Neutrino Physics
Description
Teachers working with mentors from Virginia Tech's Center for Neutrino Physics
Data Portfolio Implementation Plans for VT Center Teachers
The Virginia Tech Center's first workshop concluded with a Cosmic Ray eLab poster presentation as well as an opportunity for the teachers to browse the Data Portfolio and start to plan how they could use these activities in their own classrooms.
All of the teachers see possibilities to use activities such as the Penny Mass Histogram Lab for teaching introductory science topics, such as scientific method.
Plans were discussed to use the ZBoson and TopQuark Mass activities, the Quark Workbench, and the Cosmic Ray eLab in physics classes sprinkled in various places in the curriculum of our physics teachers. One of the teachers teaches IB Physics, and is particularly excited to use some of these activities as long term projects.
The Data Portfolio activities can also be applied to chemistry, astronomy, biology and earth science classrooms. Our teachers in these fields are planning on implementing Rolling with Rutherford and modifying it to also simulate the gold foil experiment, using the Dice Probability Lab to model genetic probabilities, Muon Lifetime can be used in chemistry and earth science to model half-life and radioactive dating and decay, LIGO eLab and Cosmic Ray eLab can be used in astonomy as well as earth science!
Our planned next workshop will be at the end of July (27 and 28); the teachers will have time at this brief workshop to flesh out their lesson plans involving all these Data Portfolio activities! We look forward to hearing how these lessons work out in their classrooms.
Cosmic Ray Workshop at Virginia Tech, June 2017
*NEW* Link to pictures taken during our VT QuarkNet Workshop!
Agenda
Wednesday June 7: Introduction to QuarkNet and Cosmic Rays
Time (ET) | Activity | |
---|---|---|
09:00 |
Introductions and paperwork; registration |
|
09:30 |
Introduction to VTl Particle Physics (Leo Piilonen) |
|
10:00
|
Introduction to QuarkNet website and Data Portfolio Level I Data Portfolio Actviities
|
|
12:00 | lunch | |
13:00
|
Work in groups on Cosmic Ray e-Lab
|
|
15:00
|
Informal Milestone Discussion with Lead Teachers
|
Thursday 8 June: Detector Commissioning and Research
Time (ET) | Actvity | |
---|---|---|
09:00
|
Level II Data Portfolio Actviity
Start research activities
|
|
11:00 | Quantum Physics (Ed Barnes) | |
12:00 | lunch | |
13:00
|
Group 1
|
Group 2
|
Friday 9 June: Research and Experiments
Time (ET) | Activity | |
---|---|---|
09:00 |
||
09:30
|
Group 1
|
Group 2
|
11:00 |
Underground physics and the search for double beta decay (Thomas O'Donnell) |
|
12:00 | lunch | |
13:00
|
Group 1
|
Group 2
|
Saturday 10 June: Pull it all together
Time (ET) | Activity | |
---|---|---|
09:00 | Discussion: What is QuarkNet? | |
09:30
|
Finalize research
|
|
11:30 | Seminar: The Elusive Neutrino (Camillo Mariani) | |
12:00 | lunch | |
13:00
|
Implemention plans
|
|
15:45 | End-of workshop survey | |
16:00 | End of Workshop |
Resources
- QuarkNet
- Handout: 2 kinds of QuarkNet login
- Cosmic Ray e-Lab
- Virginia Tech Physics
- KURF
- VT Mobile Neutrino Lab (symmetry article)
- CUORE event display
- How cosmic rays help us understand the universe (Ted)
- Cosmic ray mystery solved (Sixty Symbols)
- Higgs in cosmic rays (original paper)
- Particle Adventure
- Large Hadron rap
Contacts
- Camillo Mariani (VT QuarkNet mentor)
- Rebecca Jaronski (VT QuarkNet lead teacher)
- Nick Merrill (VT QuarkNet lead teacher)
- Ken Cecire (QuarkNet staff)
Virginia Tech QuarkNET Center - Report for Year 2016
The Virginia Tech QuarkNET Center currently has 2 active high school teachers, and is actively recruiting additional participants. Our lead teachers are Rebecca Jaronski and Nicholas Merrill.
This was an exciting summer for the Virginia Tech QuarkNET Center! We welcomed our new lead teacher and my new partner-in-crime, Nick Merrill. Nick is a teacher at the Roanoke Governor’s School and starting next summer we should be working together to really grow this center by adding new teachers from the area.
Lab work for the QuarkNET teachers in the High Energy Physic Lab really picked up where Rebecca left off last year. The lab is making great strides towards building the Micro-Chandler device for their great project of creating a detector for nuclear reactor safeguards. The Micro-Chandler requires a large number of operational and well-understood photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) and our small part of this large project is to help test and calibrate these PMTs. Last year Rebecca ran a cosmic ray/muon calibration with the cosmic ray detector Rebecca had assembled in the lab. Over the school year others tested the PMTs with a high-light setup. For this summer, the task of the QuarkNET teachers (Rebecca and Nicholas) was to test these PMTs with a low-light setup (see attached pictures for the electronics setup, pmt and laser and computer and notebook). They were looking for single PE (single photon emission), essentially the threshold light intensity that will cause the PMTs to function. In order to test this the teachers had a pulsed diode laser hooked up with some NIM hardware, and a computer system with an analysis program.(full description and pictures of the setup can be found on the PowerPoint presentation attached). The setup was already assembled and ready by the time the teachers started work this summer, so after being instructed by Dr. Sumanta Pal and Dr. Camillo Mariani in the basic design and purpose, the teachers started to work testing the PMTs. The teachers started off by finding an effective operating high voltage (HV) for each PMT by setting the LASER at a high intensity and looking for a peak around 3,000 ADC (this was essentially a measure of the light collected by the detector when a muon passed through it). The teachers found that in general, this ideal HV was between the cosmic ray test from last summer (these HVs were higher) and the high-light test (these HVs were lower). After determining the HV for that PMT, they started the LASER (see picture) at a low intensity and took data runs of 5 minutes, increasing the intensity each trial. Ideally, the data curve was supposed to show a peak that would tell them they saw the single PE, but they were not seeing that, even with taking longer runs and with adjusting the bin sizes and numbers on the histograms. It was determined to instead search for the ratio between the total number of counts and the count under the curve for that trial which had been previously determined to be around 30% for single PE. They were able to test all the free PMTs in the lab with this setup and the data resulted super-useful to the project.
Outside of the lab, the VT QuarkNET teachers had some other great chances for professional development. Merrill attended Fermilab Data camp, and Rebecca had the wonderful opportunity to spend a week in Greece at the Inspiring Science Education Summer School: “Discover the Cosmos: From Telescopes to Accelerators”. According to Rebecca: “It was an amazing experience, and it was not just the inclusive stay at the resort on Marathon Bay, or the fabulous tours of the Temple of Poseidon and the Acropolis! It was very interesting to talk to and work with teachers from outside of the US, as they have some different resources, methods, and philosophies and as teachers we are ALWAYS looking for something new, different, and exciting to engage our students in the classroom and get them truly interested in science. I have already signed up my high school astronomy class to participate in the Eratosthenes Experiment, which is an international collaboration managed by the ISE team, and have a great new tool for creating web quests and interactive lessons for students and am very excited to use these in the year to come!”
Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center 2015 Activity Report
The Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center currently has 1 active high school teacher, and is actively recruiting additional participants. Our lead teacher is Rebecca Jaronski.
Rebecca participated in research at Virginia Tech during June and July, and attended Data Camp at FNAL, July 20-24. For her research at VT, Rebecca worked with Professor Camillo Mariani to build a small cosmic ray detector. She used the detector to take background cosmic readings, and then used it to calibrate an ongoing research experiment in VT’s High Energy Physics Lab. While at Data Camp, Rebecca used data from CERN to calculate the mass of the Z0 Boson.
This fall Rebecca is looking forward to attending a cosmic ray detector workshop in St. Louis in order to run a QuarkNet detector with her students.
Equipment setup in the High Energy Physics Lab Rebecca at FNAL
Welcome to Virginia Tech QuarkNet!
Welcome to the Virginia Tech QuarkNet group. To start, here are three things you can do right now:
Create/edit your site profile (please do ASAP!)
1. In the top menu, roll over "My stuff"
2. Choose "My profile"
3. Under your group name, choose the "About" button
4. Find and choose "Edit my profile"
5. In the "Account" page, you can change your password and upload an avatar image
6. In the "Personal information" page, you can add whether you are a QN teacher, your contact info, etc.
Add a post like this one
1. In the top menu, roll over "My stuff"
2. Choose "My groups"
3. Choose "HU/W&M/GMU QuarkNet Center"
4. At the top of the right sidebar, choose "Document" or “Post” from the drop-down list; choose "Create"
5. Start typing
6. Edit
7. Choose the "Save" button at the bottom left when it is time.
Comment on this post
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