Friday Flyer - April 8, 2016
Spotlight on the CMS e-Lab: You had a great Data Camp and you want to share it with your class, but they are not ready for CSV files full of four-vectors. What will you do? It's the month after International Masteclasses, and your students are clamoring for more CMS data. Where are you going to get it? Well, try the QuarkNet CMS e-Lab, where students can make mass plots to study particles and explore the parameter space with different histograms. By the end of this academic year, the CMS e-Lab will be upgraded, changing procedures a bit but also enabling new data and new analyses. That means this will be a great summer to have a CMS e-Lab workshop. Please take note, mentors and center leaders. Contact Ken to inquire.
News from QuarkNet Central: Attention mentors and lead teachers! Due today: your RFP form for your center to indicate the level of support requested for 2016. The sooner you can set and communicate dates for your summer workshop, the better. Please let your QuarkNet main point of contact know these dates once chosen. Your point of contact can also assist if you would like to include one of these workshop experiences and to order or return cosmic ray muon detectors.
BIG WEEK, BIG DATA! This coming week, April 11-15, is International Muon Week. If you have a detector, sign up! The assignment is to take flux data all or a part of the week and share it. To learn more, read the instructions or contact Mark Adams.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Things are happening in the collider world this week. The electron machine, BEPC-II, in Beijing has set a new luminosity record for its type of accelerator, while the RHIC experiment at Brookhaven National Lab has been colliding polarized protons and learning more about their structure. On the dark (matter) side, physicists are finally set to try to reproduce controversial results from the DAMA experiment at Gran Sasso; let's see what they find!
Resources: In symmetry, learn how astrophysicists probe the Dark Matter Hot Spot of our galaxy. At the Sorbonne, Nobel Laureate Takaaki Kajita recently spoke on neutrino oscillations. What's cool? This slide from the talk in which he shows the νe-νμ imbalance from data; and learn about the Cosmic Pi detector being developed by CERN physicists.
Just for Fun: Having trouble writing that abstract? PhD Comics can help. And baseball season has begun: So far, the Mets are playing .500 ball against the Royals this year, sort of improving over the 2015 World Series . . . ah, the joys of the statistics of small numbers! And while QuarkNet had three teams in the NCAA semi-finals and one team in the finals (Syracuse women, way to go!), we were shut out of the big prize this year. Already looking to next year.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu