Friday Flyer - November 14, 2014

Spotlight on Colorado State University: The CSU QuarkNet Center has lost its current mentors due to research and teaching commitments. This center has bonded into a strong group of teachers (and they wish to continue with QuarkNet), but we need to find one or two mentors. If anyone has physics contacts or leads in the Ft. Collins/Denver area, please let us know.

Six teachers attended the August summer workshop focused on two components: CMS and Cosmic. Shane Wood, CMS fellow, guided the first two days taking a deep look at using the CMS e-Lab. Using real CMS data, the group compiled histograms and measured the mass of the Z boson. All of these activities can migrate into the teacher's classroom. Norm Buchanan gave a lecture on the LHC experiments that dovetailed with a virtual tour of CMS experiment. Teachers spoke remotely with CMS scientists and asked questions. The second two days provided advanced work with the cosmic ray detector and e-Lab. These days built on previous two years' workshops, except this time the group focused on the mechanics of data blessing: how to pick a benchmark file and select data for blessing tests. Cosmic fellow Robert Franckowiak from the Idaho State University QN Center facilitated the cosmic work. 
 

CSU lead teacher Cherie Bornhorst attended the 2014 HST program at CERN. She was there with Robert Franckowiak and Kevin Martz.

News from QuarkNet Central: EQUIP is the new DAQ interface tool. This Java-based application was a real step up from the old HyperTerminal interface and much appreciated by the teachers who learned to use it at the CSU workshop (see above). EQUIP is much easier to use and the users really like the real-time view of data capture. Want to know more? Contact Bob.

Physics Experiment Roundup: Curious about dark matter? Read this background from three scientists at EarthSky.

Resources: A nice article from symmetry, The November Revolution

Just for Fun: Do you know how these five physics demos work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xp_imnO6WE (from Veritasium)

QuarkNet Staff Teachers:

Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu

Tom Jordan: jordant@fnal.gov

Bob Peterson: rspete@fnal.gov