Our center currently has fourteen active teachers including one new member: Nick Guilbert of the Peddie School, Hightstown, New Jersey. Rutgers undergraduate students Yifan Lin and Scott Robinson, computer specialist John Doroshenko and educational specialist Dave Maiullo have provided valuable assistance with our center's programs.

In the fall of 2007, we held a series of three one-day workshops on cosmic ray detectors. These were attended by typically twelve of our active teachers. At the first workshop, the teachers, working in pairs or assisted by student-help, constructed eight cosmic ray detector kits that we received from QuarkNet . Because we had only eight kits, we were not able to assign a kit to each of the interested teachers. Instead, teachers in close geographical proximity shared some of the kits.
During this past summer, one of our lead teachers, Joe Spaccavento, along with our new teacher, Nick Guilbert, and three high school students worked in our QuarkNet -supported summer research program. They worked extensively on developing further experiments and activities with the cosmic ray detector kits. We also began exploring the feasibility of forming a large-area array using the kits that we have available. The optimal spacing for detecting high-energy cosmic rays and determining their incident azimuthal and zenith angles based on pulse-height and timing information is about half a kilometer. We've identified several sites, centrally located with respect to several of our participating schools, where such an array could be implemented. These include the large campus of the Peddie School as well as the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. In the coming year, we will continue to explore these possibilities. At the moment, the limiting factor in establishing a practical array seems to be a lack of scintillator coverage. We plan to try to identify funding sources for purchasing additional scintillator. Another outcome of the summer work was a development of the capability to operate the scintillation counters and DAQ board in remote locations by using a 6V battery-pack that is used in emergency lighting signs and is widely, and cheaply, available. We've submitted an article on this to The Physics Teacher.

The members of the Rutgers University QuarkNet Center look forward to another exciting and productive year. In addition to holding a follow-up cosmic ray detector workshop and pursuing implementation of the large-area array mentioned above, we are planning to hold a one to two week workshop on LHC physics for teachers from throughout New Jersey and possibly beyond. An excellent time to hold this would be next summer when results from the LHC should first start coming out. The goal would be to provide a sufficient background of quantum mechanics, relativity, the Standard Model, supersymmetry and particle detection techniques to the teachers so that they would be able to convey the excitement and importance of LHC physics in their high school classrooms. Many members of the experimental and theory faculty at Rutgers will help in running this workshop. In addition, we plan to investigate the possibility of holding the workshop in conjunction with our colleagues at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Studies in order to allow access to possible additional resources and to provide a larger workshop scope and reach.