University of Pennsylvania
Contact Information
Rick Van Berg
rick@upenn5.hep.upenn.edu
As last year, the program was concentrated on student research. We added a second teacher to the program which helped a good deal in terms of making a large enough group to be effective. Marc Baron, Sun Valley High School, returned this year and was joined by Darren Fox of Girard College (despite the name Girard is a private high school for disadvantaged youth - founded in 1848 via a bequest by Stephen Girard, a financier of the Revolution). This year we had relatively few student applicants for the four available slots, despite sending out hundreds of flyers to every high school and school district in the Philadelphia area. Fortunately, the four students selected for the program were extremely bright, motivated and original. The program was a great success (well, except for not getting the data set we hoped for).
One of the highlights of the program was a one-day trip to Brookhaven National Lab where the students (plus a fair number of Penn undergrads) visited the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the National Synchroton Light Source. Another highlight was spending one day helping out at the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics, which was held on the Penn campus at the end of July. However, most of the student's efforts were directed at trying to resurrect a set of proportional drift tubes originally built by Owen Long as part of his graduate studies fifteen years ago. Owen attended ICHEP and made a surprise visit to the QN project room - much to the delight of all concerned. The main efforts, as shown in their web site write up, were directed at detailed checking and tuning of the sensitive analog front end for the tubes, at writing firmware for the readout FPGA system, and writing software for the actual acquisition of the data. Although there was not quite enough time to bring all the pieces together, the individual sub-projects stretched the students and the teachers to a satisfying extent (for all concerned). Not only did the students feel that they had accomplished a lot, the teachers too picked up several bits and pieces that they hope could be useful in their classroom work--especially the use of simple programming as a didactic tool. One of Darren's students at Girard has volunteered for an internship at Penn and is due in for an interview later this week. Plans for next year are hardly gelled, although we would like to try to run a student program again.
Besides the formal mentors, Mitch Newcomer and Rick Van Berg, the students worked closely with HEP staff members Godwin Mayers (on FPGA Verilog programming), Walt Kononenko (on scintillator construction and timing), Mike Reilly on general construction and breadboarding, Rony Weiner (grad student on debugging), Jonathan Cinque and Emily Schaeffer (undergrads on debugging and the mysteries of college).
