Virginia Tech QuarkNET Center - Annual Report 2022

As the world begins to emerge from the pandemic, the Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center’s 2022 was also a bit of a revival!

The Chesapeake Section of the AAPT had their spring meeting at Radford University (20 minutes away from VT), and the VT Center Lead Teacher Rebecca Jaronski was invited to give a talk about QuarkNet and the VT Center. In addition to sharing general information about the QuarkNet program with the professors and high school teachers in attendance, she also showcased some student work from her own classes, as well as adaptations she made to Data Portfolio activities to make them more virtual-learning compatible in the last couple years.  The talk was successful and yielded a great boon for our VT Center, a new member! We are happy to welcome new recruit and first-year physics teacher (straight out of the RU physics education program) Caitlynn Fischer to our ranks!

In addition to our participation in CSAAPT, VT QuarkNet hosted a summer workshop from June 27-30.  Since it was the height of the summer, and COVID is not quite a thing of the past, the decision was made to hold the workshop in a hybrid format.  We took advantage of the VT Physics Department’s new Zoom Room, and some teachers came to campus while others were able to Zoom in from home, or while on vacation in different locations!

Two of the days of this workshop were dedicated to the Neutrino Data Workshop offered by the QuarkNet national staff. Mike Plucinski flew in from Minnesota to facilitate this with us, and we are very grateful for his guidance through relevant Data Portfolio activities and especially with letting us play the role of students for the new NOvA Neutrino Masterclass materials.  With his help I am sure we will be able to hold this masterclass with our own students soon, as our VT particle physics group is very focused on neutrino research.

The VT QuarkNet mentor professors Camillo Mariani and Tommy O’Donnell contributed to the neutrino workshop with talks about their past, ongoing, and future neutrino experiments. Prof. Mariani spoke of the MiniCHANDLER experiment which was deployed at a nuclear power plant and was able to detect the antineutrino flux from the reactor- this experiment has interesting applications for nuclear non-proliferation! The seminar also discussed the DUNE experiment and neutrino oscillation, which was a great talk to supplement the NOvA Masterclass work we did on that day.  Prof. O’Donnell’s seminar focused on the CUORE experiment, searching for neutrinoless double beta decay (and hoping to answer the question: are neutrinos and antineutrinos...really different?), and the future planned upgrade CUPID on the same topic. Both talks were perfect additions to the Neutrino Data Workshop.

We look forward to a great 2023, hopefully recruiting more teachers and maybe, finally, holding our next workshop in-person!