On Saturday March 15, 2008, approximately 15 students from Anderson High School came to the University of Cincinnati with their physics teacher, Jeff Rodriguez, to participate in a Particle Physics Masterclass. The students at UC worked in parallel with students from New York and Notre Dame and videoconferenced with them to discuss and combine results. This was part of a busy two-and-a-half weeks during which thousands of students internationally--over 150 from the US alone--did the same thing.
At UC, the students analyzed almost 1,000 particle physics events from the Delphi detector at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider. Understanding the results from LEP will help us understand the new physics for which we will search with the detectors at the LHC. At UC, faculty members Dr. Brian Meadows and Dr. Mike Sokoloff worked with the students.

The summer workshop June 16-20: Six QuarkNet high school teachers attended. Their primary goals were to construct, calibrate, troubleshoot, and develop experiments with a new cosmic ray detector. At the conclusion of the week, the teachers presented a set of experiments for the Cosmic Ray e-Lab website.

Summer Student Research June-August: Research Team: Michael Behan, Catherine Brunck, Maria Lang and teacher, Emily Rosen.

The purpose of this study was to develop an efficient method to warm up a state of the art helium refrigerator used to study electron properties. The refrigerator operates at temperatures of approximately one micro-Kelvin. Prior to the study, the warm-up time was approximately one week. The goal of this project was to decrease the warm-up time to under one day. In doing so, the affects that gas flow would have in comparison to radiation produced by an object were studied. A model of the refrigerator was constructed, using a dewar system similar to that found in the large refrigerator. Liquid nitrogen was used to cool a metallic mass in the refrigerator to temperatures of approximately 77.2 Kelvin. Warmer nitrogen gas flow was introduced at variable rates to the system in an effort to determine the affects of gas flow on warm-up time. It was found that an introduction of nitrogen gas flow, at approximately 20 P.S.I. decreased the warm-up time to approximately 31% of its original value. Gas flows larger than 24 P.S.I., however, were not found to be beneficial to the system. As such, a tube for gas flow and a fan to generate better flow will be introduced to the larger refrigerator system in an effort to decrease its warm up time.

Plans: On October 15, Jeff Rodriguez will bring students to U. Cincinnati to observe some of the working research laboratories, and to visit with the professors. We plan to participate in MasterClass 2009--either the EPPOG (European) event, or one organized in the US. June 2009 will see our 11th summer institute. We can hope there will be another cosmic ray detector to work on. There are always things for students to work on that might interest them in the ways of research. If we are fortunate enough, we will try to plan another summer student research project.

Institution URL

http://nimrod.phy.uc.edu/physics/quarknet/QuarknetLetter.html