University of Mississippi
Contact Information
Lucien Cremaldi
Physics Department
P.O. Box 1848
University, MS 38677
Email: cremaldi phy.olemiss.edu
Phone: 662-915-5311
Fax: 662-915-5045
Five teachers were able to go on a special field trip to tour the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in early June. They visited the BABAR and SLD experiment halls and saw the Klystron Gallery and End Station A as well as the site of the upcoming Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). They visited the BABAR control room and were able to see the detector.
UM researcher Dr. Sanders presented a paper to the SORMA '08 conference at Berkeley on an aerogel cherenkov detector which UM constructed for the MICE experiment at Rutherford-Appelton Lab. Oxford High School teacher Jim Reidy and OHS student Jun Ying helped with construction of the aerogel detector.
Oxford High School teacher Jim Reidy was selected as a 2008 CMS Fellow and worked with the UM HEP during summer and fall of 2008. Student Jun Ying was honored with an invitation to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair May 11-17, 2008 Atlanta, Georgia for his work on a cosmic ray project with the cosmic ray detector.
On June 23-June 25, we held a QuarkNet student-teacher workshop. There were 7 teachers and 21 students in attendance. The workshop focused on reconstruction of data at the LHC. UM faculty, Summers, Quinn, Kroeger, and Cremaldi presented a number of talks to the teachers and students, We hope to have a fall '08 meeting more devoted to the topic. Dr. Marco Cavaglia, UM faculty and present head of LIGO outreach, discussed detection of gravitational waves at the workshop. We will work closely with Dr. Cavaglia in the future.
A special web-based CMS detector simulation program, BUBBLE, was used to introduce students to and to aid reconstruction of simulated Higgs boson decays, very similar to real Higgs boson searches. HEP graduate student Peter Sonnek wrote the web based CMS detector program in which Higgs bosons and other decays can be detected in the CMS detector. The students and teachers were able to use the program to reconstruct Higgs particles decays, display the plotted data, indicating a Higgs mass of 200 GeV!
A session was devoted to the Fermilab cosmic ray detector and on assembling and operating a 6" commercial and instructional cloud chamber.
Martha Mills wrote to her local newspaper: On June 23-25, North Delta physics students attended a summer QuarkNet workshop at the University of Mississippi. Emily Ridge, Clayton Cole, Britt Lawrence, and Hillary Ellington assembled a cloud chamber in one of the lab activities. The cloud chamber was used for detecting particles of ionizing radiation. I've seen several parents and school friends who have all commented on our workshop. The kids enjoyed it so much and they're telling everyone about the things they did and saw. Lead teacher Ken Wester has left the high school ranks for a university job in Illinois. We are devastated. He will remain with us as an emeritus member.
