University of Rochester
Contact Information
Kevin McFarland
kevin.mcfarland@rochester.edu
In 2008, our summer activities focused entirely on using large-area cosmic ray detectors for student research. A team of high school students (Smudzin, Fitzstevens, Leisten, Schneider, Jones) led by high school teachers (Conrow, Hoffman, Sedita, Willie) worked approximately half-time over a five-week program to refurbish large-area counters from the NuTeV veto wall and commissioned eight 5x5' counters. (Some of these counters are destined for the veto wall for the MINERvA experiment; others will stay in Rochester and be available for future student research.) These teams joined with two undergraduate students (Arnold and Cackett) to analyze data requiring coincidences of multiple large-area counters to determine the rate and direction of air shower arrays. The puzzle for this summer's students was to evaluate whether or not there were significant numbers of cosmic ray showers coming from directions near the horizon. (Previous student teams have studied rates of downward-going showers as a function of shower size and have searched for variations in rates over a long period of time.) Results from the study were ambiguous because of observed drifts in the relative timing of multiple counters with the GPS synchronization, but the hardware is in place to continue this study at a later time.
A secondary activity (Willie and Cackett) was to upgrade our long-term cosmic-ray detector in the attic of our building with new 6000-series DAQ boards to allow us to log individual events instead of aggregate rates. When completed, this would allow Rochester data to be uploaded to the QuarkNet Cosmic Ray e-Lab. This work stalled at the end of the summer because we ran into multiple problems with the 6000-series prototype board we were working with. No production version board, which Sten Hansen thinks has solved the communication problems we ran into, is available to the Rochester group. Cackett, a Brown University computer science major from the Rochester area, will continue the development work over winter break 2008-09 if a production 6000-series board is available.
In the coming year, the University of Rochester center will work on supporting teachers who have cosmic ray detectors and continuing to take flux data from the large counters in the attic of Bausch and Lomb Hall. Three of our eight detector setups have already been checked out to classrooms (Sedita, Conrow and Paradis). Due to concerns with growing infrastructure needs in the attic, the Rochester counters will likely have to be relocated to another area in the attic during the fall and will require significant recommissioning work to get functioning again.
The majority of funding for the Rochester QuarkNet center activities has come from Prof. McFarland's NSF CAREER award, which will be fully expended sometime in this academic year. None of our major activities, including our summer student research programs, maintenance of existing detectors, special projects such as recent work on the attic cosmic ray detectors, our balloon flight project, and support for special projects in Jeff Paradis' classroom, are funded completely from QuarkNet , so our activities will require significant re-evaluation.
New activities, such as an introductory e-Lab workshop in the spring, are under discussion with QuarkNet .
Summer 2008 Participants: Lead Teachers: Joe Willie, Carol Hoffman, Paul Sedita and Paul Conrow. Undergraduate Students: Kyle Cackett (attends Brown U.) and Laura Arnold (UR) (both of whom had worked with QuarkNet /PARTICLE in previous summers). High School Students: Maia Fitzstevens, Evan Jones, Brandon Leisten, Alyssa Smudzin and Griffin Schneider. Connie Jones, the Administrative Assistant for the Particle Physics group, continuously assists with our QuarkNet efforts.
