Friday Flyer - February 5, 2016
Spotlight on the Rice University/University of Houston QuarkNet Center: This center had a very busy 2015 with "Saturday Physics" events, student research internships, and a weeklong teacher workshop. The six "Saturday Physics" events took place during the school year, featuring talks by professors for high school students and teachers on a variety of topics from lunar solar power to the physics of sound and music. Thirteen teachers attended the weeklong teacher workshop in June, which included talks given by professors on their research in addition to time working with cosmic ray muon detectors. By the end of the workshop, teachers had six detectors up and running. Two teachers and eight students were involved with more long-term summer work, participating in six-week or eight-week-long research internships. This center also sent Julia Bell and Linda Bazard to Data Camp at Fermilab in July of 2015.
News from QuarkNet Central: The CMS masterclass has a new event display, iSpy-webGL. You can try it out here or watch a screencast about it by Zachary Going, a former masterclass student who now studies physics at Tufts University. More progress! CMS masterclass documentation is complete and can be found at this link. The CMS masterclass web pages have new features for 2016, including adaptation of the WZH-path to the new event display and a new translation into Turkish. It is not quite ready for the IMC site yet, but you can have a sneak preview on the development server. Contact Ken Cecire if you have questions.
Physics Experiment Roundup: Searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model, the MoEDAL experiment at CERN has been taking data now for nearly a year, and includes contributions from 20 high school students from the UK. Physicists at Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) use muonium to look for antigravity, as described in this Guardian article. Scientists at Berkeley National Laboratory create the first-ever, two-stage laser-plasma accelerator powered by independent laser pulses.
Resources: Learn how to discover weird new particles with this video from MinutePhysics. Fermilab's Don Lincoln discusses the idea of quantum gravity; describing gravity at a quantum level continues to elude physicists today.
Just for Fun: Love to build or fly paper airplanes? This site has information on experiments you can perform with paper airplanes, challenges for your students, and even an official contest into which you may enter.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: MarkRAdams74@gmail.com
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu