2024 Virginia Tech QuarkNET Center Annual Report

The year 2024 has been a revitalizing year of growth and change for the Virginia Tech Center.  Center mentor Camillo Mariani had to take a step back due to other professional obligations. Professor Tommy O’Donnell has stepped up to the plate as a pinch hitter/mentor and really delivered for our center this year.

Our main focus of the VT center for this year was recruitment and growth. Southwest Virginia is a rural area, and there are limited numbers of local physics teachers who are able to attend regulatory. Our Lead Teacher, Rebecca Jaronski, used the Virginia Tech physics department’s high school recruitment list to send out an invitation to physics teachers across the state, and we received responses from over 10 new teachers, many of whom were able to attend our summer workshop. Several of these new teachers were over 2 hours from Blacksburg, but Prof. O’Donnell and the VT physics department contributed funding to help support those teachers with lodging, gas, and parking reimbursement. Our workshops have been hybrid/virtual since the pandemic, and we had several teachers attend online as well. 

The summer workshop was held June 5-7, 2024. Since we had so many new teachers, the first day was dedicated to introductory particle physics activities, an introduction to QuarkNet, and creating lesson plans from the Data Portfolio. Prof. O’Donnell also gave a talk about the CUORE experiment and rare event searches that gave the new members an exciting and challenging introduction to experimental particle physics in real life. The next two days we participated in the new National Relativity Workshop offered by QuarkNet. Two QuarkNet fellows, Jeremy Wegner and Joel Klammer, were kind enough to fly in as facilitators.  Additionally, VT Professor Tatsu Takeuchi gave a very engaging talk about relativity using graphics and images from his book. Our teachers were also treated to a tour of the VT high energy physics labs, including a small scale version of CUORE, which we suspect is the coldest spot in Virginia!

Rebecca’s spring 2024 student teacher, Carmen White, a VT physics grad and now a teacher in Loudoun County, was among the new recruits, and she was able to attend Fermilab for Data Camp this year in addition to the summer VT workshop. She had a great time, and is excited to bring particle physics to her students at her new job!

In other news, Rebecca participated in the 2024 Lead Teacher Camp held at SURF. It was an incredible experience, meeting and creating community with other lead teachers at a place where so much amazing physics is taking place. In addition to the informative and useful work sessions, she was able to tour the 4850 Level (almost a mile underground), see the site of the Ray Davis solar neutrino experiment, the LZ dark matter detector, and the DUNE caverns and construction. The lead teachers were also treated to a Black Hills bus tour, including Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse monument.

Last school year, Virginia Tech hosted particle physics field trips for Rebecca’s high school classes. We will hopefully be able to have more field trips, guest speakers, and maybe a masterclass or two for our center teachers this year. Rebecca is also scheduled to give a talk about QuarkNet at the CSAAPT meeting at Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in October 2024. 

We are looking forward to 2025!