FIT Annual Report

This year at FIT was very successful. After last year's summer internship, students were introduced cosmic rays and muon detection. A discussion came about limiting background noise and coincidence among paddles. That following school year a student from Palm Bay High School (Devon), wanted to see if background noise  could be limited by submerging the Paddles under water. After speaking with Dr. Holmann, we decided to surround the tanks with 10 galloon aquariums. As a result Devon placed first in the physics category at regional and 4th at the Florida State Science fair.

This summer at FIT we were able to recruit 5 local teachers, 1 Quarknet lead teacher from UCF, and 2 lead teachers giving a total of 8 teachers. During the teacher workshop we had talks from local professors. Dr Rybicki gave two talks. One on Nuclear Fission and one on Nuclear weapons. Dr Petite gave a talk on categories of the stars and the sun. She also brought out a telescope with a sun filter to observe sunspots. Dr Holmann gave a talk on CERN and his research on using Muon counts to detect Uranium transport. We were also able to visit FIT's new DSL (digital scholar lab).

Quarknet Fellow Robert Frankowicz and Dr Mark Adams arrived for the week long workshop. Discussions on posters, equip software, and plateauing paddles were led by Robert and discussions on e-lab, speed of a muon, and scattering were led by Mark Adams. Dr. Yumiceva arrived during the week of June 13th and discussed a student project on the effect of electromagnetic fields and the interaction between muons based on the right hand rule. The discussion also involved the loss of energy as muons passed through a layer of lead.  UCF lead teacher Adam LeMee instructed students and teachers through the following quarknet activities:  "Rolling with Rutherford", "Top Quark" & "Lasers/Spectroscopes".

FIT Quarknet also hosted 6 High School students.  Two of the students were from Bayside H.S, to students were from Melbourne H.S. and two of the students were from Palm Bay H.S.  Students designed their own projects, collected and analyzed the data, then shared their findings by creating posters on the quarknet sight. Topics of interest included:

          Flux study comparison at different floors of a building

          Effects of an electromagnet on coincidence

          Deflection of muon's through a Faraday Cage

          Effects of atmospheric conditions on muon counts

          Experimental quantification of the speed of a muon

          Effect of noise flux study by introduction of a plasma (nebula) ball