2015 JHU Annual Report
QuarkNet Annual Report 2015
JHU Center
The JHU QuarkNet center had another successful year, involving both high school teachers and students in its activities. The one-week teacher workshop took place from 20-24 July, and the six-week student internship ran from 30 June to 9 August. We had several teachers from the JHU center use their cosmic ray muon detectors throughout the year, and our center also participated in the 2015 CMS Masterclass.
- Teacher Workshop
During the first morning, teachers and students listened to a variety of talks from professors from the Physics & Astronomy department of JHU, as well as a talk from co-lead teacher Kevin Martz. A list of talks, with links, follows:
Dr. Morris Swartz - History of Particle Physics Discoveries
Mr. Kevin Martz - Neutron Diffraction Physics
Dr. Andrei Gristan - Matter in Space & Time
For the rest of the week, teachers participated in two QuarkNet-hosted workshops: the CMS Data Workshop and the CMS e-lab. Both of these workshops entailed using real data from the LHC CMS experiment to infer properties about particles produced in the proton-proton collisions. See here for a link to the agenda for the week's activities.
In both of the workshops, teachers took advantage of the resources available in the QuarkNet Data Portfolio, an ever-growing set of student-centered activities and curricular resources that are intended to help teachers incorporate particle physics concepts into their classrooms.
- Student Research
9 students (4 from Damascus HS; 5 from Hereford HS) participated in a 6-week summer research internship beginning on 29 June and running to 7 August. After a short series of introductory activities, students were set loose to pursue research topics of their own choosing. Alongside this theoretical research, students also designed and conducted experiments with the QuarkNet muon detectors: one group attempted to determine a correlation between muon flux and time of day; another group attempted to determine the mean lifetime of the muon once brought to rest inside the scintillating material.
See our Drupal page for a list of topics, the research abstracts, and PDFs of the summary posters:
Posters:/document/research-posters-2015