Student abstract information for HS internships at WIPAC/UW–Madison

Vetal, a multimessenger online analysis tool

Haley James and Elsa Forberger (West High School), Blake Gallay (Middleton High School)

Amanda Nothem (Whitnall HS)

Josh Wood and Sílvia Bravo (WIPAC)

The purpose of our research was to develop an online tool to analyze pubic data sets from IceCube and FermiLAT. The goal was to facilitate multimessenger astronomy analyses targeting both scientists and amateur researchers.

Students worked on understanding the information publicly provided by a neutrino detector and a gamma-ray detector and transforming data sets so that they could be displayed and analyzed jointly in a simple manner. At the end of the internship, they had completed an online tool to display different sets of data, including tools to filter data by energy and date. The group started working on a likelihood analysis to identify if clusters of neutrinos and gamma rays might be correlated in time and space, thus pointing to interesting regions of the sky. These efforts will continue during the fall WIPAC HS internship.

Improved algorithms for classification of DECO events

Emme Hannibal (Oregon High School), Blake Gallay (Middleton High School), Marcus Graham (East High School)

Amanda Nothem (Whitnall HS)

Justin Vandenbroucke and Sílvia Bravo (WIPAC)

The purpose of our research was to improve the current computer-based algorithms for the classification of DECO events. The main goal of DECO is to detect muons from cosmic-ray showers, but the app also detects background radiation and noise in the devices. Emme and Blake worked on improved algorithms to identify data taken at a given country and region with the goal of engaging more users in those areas and facilitating new analyses using local data.

CosmicWatch, a desktop muon detector

Haley James and Elsa Forberger (West High School), Emme Hannibal (Oregon High School), Blake Gallay (Middleton High School), Marcus Graham (East High School)

Amanda Nothem (Whitnall HS)

Spencer Axani (MIT) and Sílvia Bravo (WIPAC)

CosmicWatch is a research project developed at MIT that has both science and educational goals. The purpose of this project was to engage students in the construction and testing of particle physics detectors using these small muon desktop detectors. All students built a few detectors (3-4 each), and Haley, Elsa and Blake also led the analysis of data, including measurements at different angles and locations in a building, and with different environmental conditions (day/night, outdoors and in a cooler). These efforts will continue during the fall WIPAC HS internship.