Friday Flyer - October 25, 2024

 

Spotlight on the Florida State University QuarkNet Center

Joy Hartsock has been an active member of the FSU QuarkNet Center for several years. Recently, she became an active QuarkNet coding fellow, and this year, she stepped into the role of lead teacher at the FSU center. Last spring, Joy attended the QuarkNet Lead Teacher Camp held at the Sanford Lab in South Dakota. Following the camp, she collaborated with FSU mentor Ted Kolberg and QuarkNet staff to plan the FSU summer workshop, which took place from July 24-26. Joy, along with Emily Gwin, another coding fellow from the Tallahassee area, co-facilitated a coding workshop during the first two days. On the third day, the group toured the National MagLab at FSU, participated in a share-a-thon to exchange teaching activities and "tricks of the trade," and applied their coding skills to analyze NOvA masterclass data.

FSU Workshop 2024
FSU workshop participants gather around a statue of Paul Dirac during their Summer 2024 workshop.

We also have some sad news to report from the FSU center this year. Professor Emeritus and long-time FSU QuarkNet mentor Horst Wahl passed away on October 4, 2024. His loss is felt deeply by many, including the many QuarkNetters he worked with over the years. Joy Hartsock writes, "Horst Wahl was a dedicated educator not just in the university setting, but in every setting. He was committed to engaging students and teachers of all ages by asking the big questions. He was a beloved member of the QuarkNet Family who valued community. His door was always open to anyone who wanted to learn."

 

 

News from QuarkNet Central

Congratulations!: A big congratulations to KSU physicist and QuarkNet mentor Bharat Ratra for winning the prestigious Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society. Read more about Bharat and the prize from APS and from KSU. And a big congratulations to Purdue University Northwest physicist and QuarkNet mentor Neeti Parashar for earning a prestigious American Physical Society fellowship.  Read more about the fellowship and Neeti from Purdue Northwest News

QuarkNet in the News: This Symmetry article about International Cosmic Day features Indiana QuarkNet teacher Jeremy Wegner and his students at Winamac Community High School. This article from Notre Dame News highlights QuarkNet's involvement in the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications. 

Upcoming Dates:

  • Dark Matter Day 2024: Each year on or around October 31, the world celebrates the hunt for dark matter on Dark Matter Day. Participate in DMD virtually, or at an event near you!
  • World Wide Data Day (W2D2): Registration is now open for World Wide Data Day 2024, which is set for November 14, 2024. If you plan to participate, please register by November 4. For more, see this recent W2D2 Memo, and feel free to utilize this new, cool W2D2 flyer! Questions?...contact Ken or Shane.
  • International Cosmic Day 2024: The 13th International Cosmic Day will take place on November 26, 2024. Click here for more information, including how to register. 
  • AAPT Winter Meeting 2025: The AAPT WM 2025 will be held January 18-21, 2025, in St. Louis, MO. 
  • Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Teacher Conference:  The 2025 KITP Teacher Conference will focus on particle physics, and will take place in Santa Barbara on February 8, 2025. For more information, including how to register, please see the conference page.  As the website indicates, financial aid for travel and lodging is awarded on a rolling basis.
  • International Masterclasses 2025: Fermilab-based International Masterclasses will be held March 10 - April 11, 2025. Online registration will begin in November. Check out the October 18 masterclass circular for more information.

In Memoriam: Sadly, in addition to the passing of Horst Wahl, mentioned above, we report the passing of another member of our QuarkNet family. Matthew Jochmans was a beloved teacher at Towson (MD) High School and a member of the Johns Hopkins QuarkNet Center. Matt passed away in August from a heart attack while riding his bicycle on the NCR trail in Maryland. Jeremy Smith, who knew Matt since a JHU QuarkNet meeting in 2006, wrote of Matt, "...his constant positivity and curiosity never failed to enrich our yearly meetings. He was a much-loved teacher at Towson HS: you could tell by the way his students interacted with him that they valued him as both an instructor and as a caring adult in their lives." Jeremy also notes that Matt was famous for greeting each of his students with a handshake every single day, and at the beginning of each class he would reiterate his mantra: "My grades do not reflect my worth as a human being."

 

 

Physics Experiment Roundup

From CERN: The 2024 proton run at the LHC ended on October 16 with more collisions than planned. The final run of the year will consist of lead-ion collisions, and will begin in November. From the ATLAS experiment: Decoding top quarks with precision, and from hot off the virtual press from CMS: Using photons to probe the structure of nuclei

A construction update from the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in South Dakota...Successful delivery of a steel beam a mile underground

SLAC will host a symposium on November 8 to honor of the 50th anniversary of the J/Psi discovery. The event will be web-cast on Zoom, available from this symposium event page

 

Resources

From CERN's Physics Education Research Team: A pilot version of a particle physics course for high school students

From Symmetry, take a tour of 17 national laboratories across the U.S. from your own home using this interactive map, or download this poster. UChicago News brings us The long and strange lives of Enrico Fermi's accelerator building at UChicago

Don Lincoln has an article in the October 2024 issue of The Physics Teacher on quark/gluon plasma, a.k.a. "melted protons." Also from TPT: Learning physics from movies, using AI to generate physics problems, using ChatGPT in inquiry-based learning, and Ferris Wheel Earth. From the November 2024 issue, another movie reference: Buzz Lightyear and time dilation.

Kansas QuarkNet teacher Jim Deane recently pointed out that current cosmic ray flux data is available from the cosmic ray subsystems aboard Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. Here is more about the Cosmic Ray Subsystem instrumentation. Thanks, Jim!

 

Just for Fun

With Halloween just around the corner, it's time to sharpen those pumpkin-carving tools, and pick out a design for your jack-o-lantern. Here are some ideas from ATLAS, IceCube, NASA, and NOAA, and NSF

Xkcd brings us Temperature Scales, and Solar Protons

More News from QuarkNet Central the Sun, or Fun with Detectors!: The October 4 Friday Flyer mentioned that you may want to look north, and to be sure your cosmic ray detector is turned on. Indiana QuarkNetter Jeremy Wegner carefully followed these instructions, and recorded the effects of a recent CME event both visually and in data collected from his QuarkNet detector. Notice evidence of the Forbush decrease and the subsequent recovery in the coincidence rate. (Thanks, Jeremy!)

 

QuarkNet Staff
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov  
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Spencer Pasero: spasero@fnal.gov 
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu 

Additional Contacts