2014 Annual Report - Idaho State University

The tenth annual ISU QuarkNet Summer Institute was held June 16 - 20, 2014.  QuarkNet veterans Tegan Byerly of Caldwell, Idaho, Robert Franckowiak of Logan, Virginia Jones of Idaho Falls, Dr. Steven Millward of Grace, Idaho, Daniel VanWasshenova of Pocatello, Idaho, Keith Quigley of Roy Utah, participated this year, along with QuarkNet newbie Michael Matusek of Pocatello, Idaho.  During the institute, these Associate Teachers and Dr. Steve Shropshire plateaued each detector and did a preliminary blessing of each CRD.  Starting Tuesday Robert Fannkowiak led us in an advanced workshop on using all three e-lab tools for calibrating detectors.  All 36 counters in our 9 CRDs were plateaued and blessed using a standardized procedure, and set to a standard count rates over the same intervals while stacked together.  The hope is that this will allow coordinated flux studies with the CRDs widely separated over three states this school year.  The Associate Teachers uploaded data for analysis, and posted four reports on the QuarkNet web site.  They also prepared lesson plans for their schools to use with the cosmic ray detectors. 

Three lectures were given during the workshop.  The topics were Current Research at the IAC, presented by Dr. Alan Hunt, Current Research at CERN by Robert Frankowiak, and Developing a Cherenkov detector for Jefferson national Accelerator Laboratory.

During the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014, all nine cosmic ray detectors were shared between all ten of the Associate Teachers who participated in the 2013 Summer Institute.  Each teacher used one or two detectors for the whole school year to introduce their students to particle physics.  All six Associate Teachers who participated in the 2014 Summer Institute will use one or two of the nine ISU detectors in this fashion in the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014.