Notre Dame QuarkNet Center Annual Report 2022
The Notre Dame center has been pretty busy in the past year. Students from nearly St. Joseph High School and not-as-nearby Winamac Community High School participated in MINERvA masterclasses on different days in March, after which the teachers prepared for their extensive summer program. At Notre Dame, the University supports summer research by teachers and students, which ranges from cosmic ray studies to CMS data analysis to new detector technologies. Among the highlights of the summer were construction of 48 Cosmic Watch detectors for testing by QuarkNet under the direction of teacher Dan Kallenberg and Senior Tech Dan Ruggiero and the addition of visiting teacher Miki Ohtsuka from not-at-all nearby Waseda Honjo Senior High School in Japan. The last week of the summer program was held jointly with the Virtual QuarkNet Center at Notre Dame and included additional programs that teachers in both groups could join. The synergy with the talented "Virtuals" was great. The Notre Dame center was visited in summer and fall by students on two different Pokagon Band Tribal K-12 field trips, sponsored by the Department of Defense. Also in autumn, students from Winamac participated with teacher Jeremy Wegner in World Wide Data Day and International Cosmic Day, the latter with a cosmic ray detector on an airplane. All through, Notre Dame QuarkNet teachers met weekly on Monday afternoons during the academic year, exchanging ideas, issues, and laughs.
There are also personal items of note for 2022. Randy Ruchti, our longtime mentor and one of the founding PI's of QuarkNet, retired to Arizona (but still stays involved in ND and CMS). The Virtual Center visit featured their mentors Danielle McDermott and Antonio Delgado as well as fusion physicist Dan Karmgard. Danielle was once a Notre Dame QuarkNet teacher and eventually got her PhD at Notre Dame; she is now at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her husband Dan was another longtime ND QuarkNet mentor and CMS physicist. Antonio is also a QuarkNet mentor and particle physics theorist at Notre Dame. It was a great homecoming!
Students at Notre Dame working on cosmic ray detectors for a muography project..
Cosmic Wttch cosmic ray detectors assembled at Notre Dame.
Pokagon Band students make cosmic ray measurements outside Reyniers Life Building.