Friday Flyer - November 13, 2015

Spotlight on the University of Wisconsin-Madison QuarkNet Center: The small but very active QuarkNet center in Wisconsin is tightly bound with one really big detector and, potentially, many really small ones. In the first category is IceCube, the giant neutrino telescope that uses the ice mass at the South Pole as a Cerenkov detector. As part of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC), the group has built and manages an IceCube masterclass that will have 12 institutes in four countries for 2016. On the small side, physicists, teachers, and students worked last year and this summer on turning cell phone cameras into cosmic ray detectors in a project called the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-Ray Observatory (DECO).

News from QuarkNet Central: International Masterclasses have had a Facebook page for several years now, with nearly 9,000 likes. The International Masterclasses Twitter account, @physicsIMC, was born a week ago over open laptops in CERN Restaurant 1. (What better place?) The idea is to build momentum so that students around the world will tweet their masterclass experiences with the hashtag #LHCIMC16. Visit both pages and follow International Masterclasses on Twitter! 

Physics Experiment Roundup: How big are those tiny, ghostly neutrinos? Big enough that physicists studying them were awarded not only the Nobel Prize this year, but also the Breakthrough Prize. (Of course, neutrinos themselves don't break through—they just go through everything while practically never interacting.) Don't forget those big, bad protons either; did you see the LHC report on 60 Minutes? 

Resources: Is particle physics relevant? Well, duh, it's just the rules of the road for all the matter and energy in the entire universe. But to double down, symmetry brings it home with The particle physics of you. And now that we've established it matters, read up on neutrinos, courtesy of AAPT and Albert Einstein's colossal mistake, courtesy of CNN and Don Lincoln. Back on the LHC front, a resource has just been established by some teachers, students, and physicists: the new blog Little Things, Big Ideas. 

Just for Fun: It's photos! It's a (virtual, online) walk! Vote for the best physics photos in the Physics Photowalk. 

QuarkNet Staff Teachers:
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Bob Peterson: rspete@fnal.gov
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu