2014 Annual Report - JHU

Submitted by JeremySmith
Published: | Group(s):
Johns Hopkins University QuarkNet Center

QuarkNet Annual Report 2014

JHU Center

The JHU QuarkNet center had another successful summer, involving both high school teachers and students in its activities.  The one-week teacher workshop took place from 28 July to 1 August, and the six-week student internship ran from 30 July to 9 August.

 

  1. Teacher Workshop

During the mornings, teachers and students listened to a variety of talks from professors and graduate students from the Physics & Astronomy department of JHU.  See our Drupal site for details and links: /document/list-talks .  Subjects included:

  • Particle Physics
    • Mr. J. Smith – Introduction to, and History of, Particle Physics
    • Dr. A. Gritsan  - What is Higgs? A person, a field, a particle, a theory?
    • Dr. P. Maksimovic – The Standard Model and Particle Detectors
    • Dr. J. Kaplan – Higgs and electroweak symmetry breaking Q&A
    • Dr. M. Swartz – The Photoelectric Effect
    • Mr. Kevin Martz – My CERN Summer Vacation
  • Astrophysics & Cosmology
    • Dr. J. Krolik – Black Holes
    • Dr. M. Kamionkowski – Cosmic Microwave Background & B-mode Polarization
    • Dr.  T. Essinger-Hileman – The CLASS CMB Polarization Experiment
  • Education & Diversity
    • Dr.  R. Leheny – Active Learning in Introductory Physics Education
    • Ms. A. Sady – Diversity Challenges in Physics

 

 

In the afternoons, teachers concentrated on designing, constructing and testing a device for quantitative measurement of the photoelectric effect.  See our Drupal page for details: /content/afternoon-activity-2014-workshop-photoelectric-effect-leds

  1. Student Research
     

Approximately 11 students (4 from Towson HS, 4 paid and 3 unpaid from Hereford HS) participated in a 6-week summer research internship beginning on 30 July and running to 9 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 detector: 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:

 

Topics: /document/2014-summer-research-abstracts

 

Posters:/document/2014-jhu-summer-research-list-topics-posters

2014