Spotlight on the Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center
The Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center is one of the more rural QuarkNet centers and also one of the newer centers. They just ran their Associate Teacher Institute (ATI) last summer. While they covered a lot on the cosmic ray side, neutrinos were a real highlight. The group was able to tour the Kimballton Underground Research Facility run by Virginia Tech to measure neutrinos—and one of the teachers stayed around to do research after the ATI. They also had a look at the Virginia Tech Mobile Neutrino Lab designed to look at emissions from reactors. Check out their page and see how mentor Camillo Mariani and lead teachers Rebecca Jaronski and Nicholas Merrill keep things interesting and Hokie.
News from QuarkNet Central
International Masterclasses are coming soon. They start in Europe with the International Day of Women and Girls in Science and then officially start with the first regular CERN videoconferences on February 15. Videoconferences start at Fermilab on March 9—get signed up now! e-mail Ken!—and, while they officially end April 7, linger with Spanish videoconferences into May.
More masterclass news: The latest IMC circular is available and yesterday, students at Rossville High School in Indiana, Godwin High School in Virginia, and Medford High School in Massachusetts all had a special early masterclass using the CMS J/Psi measurement. Shane stage-managed and LHC fellows Marla Glover, Mike Fetsko, and Mike Wadness, respectively, led the activiities at their schools. Summer Blot, an IceCube physicist at DESY Zeuthen in Germany who had once participated in International Masterclasses as Mike Fetsko's student at Godwin, was the expert and inspiration in the videoconference.
Check out the IMC Twitter page, @physicsIMC. And do not forget to have students in masterclasses tweet their experiences with #LHCIMC18.
QuarkNet Nuts and Bolts
Have you seen any glitches or experienced rough patches using the QuarkNet site? Let us know! We actively seek to correct any site issues. Just go to the bottom of any page in the sites and find "Report site issues" under "Contact us." Or you can e-mail Shane or Ken!
Physics Experiment Roundup
Here is a nice article about the NOvA experiment at Fermilab in the University of Virginia Cavalier Daily. If your experiments are more toward rocket science, check out this book review in ars tecnica. [Hey, we are accelerators too. - Falcon 9 rocket]
Resources
Where to begin? Well, if you are experiencing a Seldon Crisis, this article on sociophysics in Physics Today may be of help. And to understand it better, some data visualization courtesy of Nature may be the thing. And who wrote that program? Fermilab reminds us that coding is for everyone,
Round these out with particle physics etymology and a sort of quantum language lesson from symmetry, and we have ample resources this week.
Just for Fun
This comes to us from the cars-in-space department: a live feed of Elon Musk's car. In space. (Hat tip to vigilant Oklahoma State QuarkNet mentor Joe Haley)
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Deborah Roudebush: droudebush@cox.net
Jeremy Smith: jsmith10@bcps.org
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu