JHU QuarkNet Annual Report 2025

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The JHU Quarknet center had another successful year. In March, teachers and their students participated in the annual LHC Masterclass, with approximately 30 students attending. 

We transferred stewardship of one cosmic ray detector to Matt J, who will use it at his new school Montgomery Blair along with his colleagues and new Quarknet teachers James R and Evan P.

During the last full week of July, we held our annual summer workshop, a 5-day workshop for 14 teachers, with JHU’s physics department providing supplemental funding to allow us to have more than the usual number of teachers, and for 5 days instead of 4. (See our agenda page here: https://quarknet.org/node/2842)

Our usual model is to invite guest speakers in the morning and do various "lab pathways" in the afternoon.

We heard talks from our stalwart group of theoretical and experimental particle physicists, long time friends and contributors to our program, who spoke on a variety of themes:

• Sean Carroll (symmetry and invariance)
• Marc Kamionkowski (dark matter)
• Andrei Gritsan (tetraquark properties)
• Nima Arkani-Hamed (perturbation theory and Feynman diagrams with simple math)

Because JHU has such a large and robust astronomy and earth/planetary sciences faculty, we were treated to several talks from both professors at JHU and from research scientists at STScI. Among these speakers were:

• Alessandra Corsi (multi-messenger astronomy)
• Emanuele Berti (theoretical gravitational wave physics)
• Daniel Beller (nematic materials)
• Ibou Bah (GR and black hole physics)
• Ben Fernando (seismology for atmospheric tracking)

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For the afternoon work, teachers went in a variety of directions depending on their interests and how new they were to the group. Initially several teachers wanted to work on incorporating Desmos into the classroom, but there were issues with Desmos changing its login models and we had to pivot. Some teachers familiarized themselves with their new cosmic ray detector. Three worked on a lab activity using capacitors in the AP classroom. Several were interested in the 2.5 meter student radio telescope and worked to learn how to use it. A few worked on Jeremy Smith's plans for creating a "neutrino data camp," and in particular were interested in a Python notebook related to damped oscillators.