QUARKNET and NSF RET SITE: Summer 2003
Julia Thompson
Prof. of Physics, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Adj. Prof. of Physics, Univ. of Missouri at St. Louis
(UMSL)
Graduate student assistant Ms. Kari van Brunt assisted Thompson
and Kraus in leading a group of high school teachers in further
investigations of the characteristics of events with separated
coincidences, while also preparing equipment and activities
for the teachers' home physics classes.
Debbie Gremmelsbacher
,
of Parkway South High School, St. Louis, in preparation for working with
her physics class,
searched web
sites, participated in the Quarknet week at Fermilab, participated in
making a scintillation counter, assessed the
performance of counters, and studied the counting rate as a function
of overlap of two small counters, including coincidence rates with the
counters separated. The PMT's for the small counters were the BURLE
PMT's (with embedded high voltage) suggested to be used with the
coincidence circuitry developed by Howard Matis at Berkeley.
Gene Bender,
of DeSmet Jesuit High School in St. Louis, spent two weeks in Soudan,
Minnesota, helping with
installation and testing of the MINOS far detector. He also
participated in the Quarknet week, and spent the rest of his
time learning about the counters and hardware and working with
Kraus on solutions to high voltage and readout problems for
counters to be used both for pedagogical purposes in high schools
and in high school cosmic ray stations which would be part of the
proposed network. At the end of his time he began
(together with Thompson and Kraus)
an
pdf or
postscript evaluation
of the board provided by Fermilab to put GPS time-stamping on
an event.
Elisabeth Langford , of
Southeast High School in Springfield,
Illinois,
worked on calibration and study of the 6-counter stack and two small
counters
which had formed the final detector in the summer of 2002.
She intends to use this work in conjunction with her Physical Sciences
class (mostly 10th graders) and as a project for the science
club, which Wanda Britt advises.
Steve Grosland , of Chicago,
Illinois,
worked with Dave Kraus on a second set of scintillator counters
an data acquisition system, and also on a literature search of relevant
experimental results presented to conferences or in the literature.
Mark Godwin of the Governor's
School in South Carolina worked on understanding the equipment and
on analysis of the 6-counter stack plus 2 smaller counters
of the 2002 detector. His report is available either in
pdf or
postscript format.
Final Wrap-up Session, 2003
A final wrap-up session was given
1-4 pm, July 31, 2003,
in the group's work headquarters, 405 Research Hall, UMSL.
Interested area teachers attended.
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation
and the Quarknet Consortium, but these organizations are not responsible
for views expressed on this web site.
Last modified June 28, 2004, by J.A. Thompson