Hawaii QuarkNet 2025 Annual Report
The UH QuarkNet effort in 2025 centered on a Teacher's workshop held at UH Manoa from Mar. 17-19, 2025. Overall, five high school teachers participated. The first two days of the workshop focused on neutrino physics, including an introduction to neutrino masses and neutrino osciallation, and an introduction to the NOvA experiment. The third day focused on cosmic ray physics, including the Cosmic Watch project. During the second day of the workshop, UH Professor John Learned spent approximately one hour engaging informally with the high school teachers, describing his work on experimental neutrino physics and answering questions.
During the morning of the first day of the workshop, there was an approximately 2 hour long informal meeting between the high school students and UH faculty/instructors (Alex Dvornikov, Jason Kumar, Chad Junkermeier) who have taught introductory UH physics courses. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss strategies for helping students make the transition from high school to university-level physics coursework. The topics discussed included syllabi, student work and study habits, student strengths and weaknesses, differences between physics, STEM and non-STEM majors, and expecations of students. This meeting was felt to be very productive by both the high school teachers and the UH instructors, and it is hoped that such informal meetings will be part of future Teachers Workshops. At future events, it is hoped that high teachers may be able to see and do UH introductory physics labs, to better help with preparing high school students.
More recently, a new UH faculty member, Prof. Peter Lewis, has been onboarded into the UH QuarkNet effort. His research focus is experimental particle physics, and he will take over primary responsibility for interacting with the teachers in operating the CR muon detectors. A new co-lead teacher, Sarah Kate May, is currently being on-boarded, and will join Tiffany Coke.
Currently, three cosmic ray detectors are fully operational with the Hawaii QuarkNet progam (at Punahou School, BYU-Hawaii, and at Windward Community College). A fourth detector is located at the Kamehameha School and in the process of being made fully operational. A fifth detector at Maui High School is not currently operational.