Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Contact Information
Stewart Loken
loken@lbl.gov
The LBNL QuarkNet Center has been in operation since 2001. Two of the lead teachers, Sean Fottrell and Laura Guthrie, have continued to participate in our program. Glen Melnik, Richard Damian and Rodger Johnson have also been active for a number of years.
July 21-26, 2008, we hosted our second workshop on Physics in and through Cosmology. This program was co-hosted by the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP). The workshop attracted ten teachers including Fottrell, Melnik, Damian and Johnson and 30 high school students selected by the teachers. The 2008 workshop was a great success with out-standing students, speakers and teachers. The workshop started each day with discovery stations designed to introduce topics such as lenses, gravity, centripetal force, and temperature, which would be discussed during the talks. After the discovery stations, one of the scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab gave a lecture. Students and teachers learned how scientists seek answers to the "big questions" in cosmology. Each day the lecture program concentrated on a specific question. Day one addressed Cosmology for the 21st Century. Day two and day three looked at the History and Structure of the Universe. Day four described the Standard Model of Particles and Interactions and introduced cosmic ray physics. Day five looked Beyond the Standard Model of Particles and Interactions and day six discussed Cosmologists for the 21st Century.
We plan to continue meeting on Saturdays during the winter. These one-day workshops will focus on the design and construction of new cosmic ray detectors as well as on experiments with the existing detectors.
Rollie Otto, formerly of the LBNL Center for Science and Engineering Education, and now with BCCP, played a key role in organizing the workshop as did Laurie Kerrigan, a physics teacher at Mercy High School in San Francisco. Many LBNL scientists presented talks at the workshop: George Smoot, Eric Linder, Nao Suzuli, Nikhil Padmanabhan, Stewart Loken, Ayana Holloway Arce, Alexie Leauthaud, Reiko Nakajima, Mia Ihm and Kevin Lesko. Helmuth Spieler, a senior scientist in the Physics Division and an internationally recognized expert on detectors, makes major contributions to the Saturday detector sessions.
