To learn more about elementary particle physics, check the poster in the exploratorium, or check the US QUARKNET bibliography: http://quarknet.fnal.gov/run2/biblio.shtml>.
To learn more about the elementary particle physics of E865, look at the "symmetry" folder in this demonstration, or look at the particle adventure description of lepton conservation. The particular process for which E865 was searching was of a funny particle called a kaon changing to some othe particles, called a pion, a muon, and an electron. (You probably learned about those if you checked out the folders above. If not, don't worry. The main thing for us is that E865 was looking for electrons, which were going fast enough to give off Cerenkov radiation.
To learn more about Cerenkov radiation see the Cerenkov folder or do a search on the web. I found http://www.cakes.mcmail.com/cerenkov/cerenkov.htm.
To learn more about E865, and how its detectors work together to detect the particles studied, see one of the student writeups ( Andrew Willis, high school student, Anne Smith or Melinda Nickelson, undergraduates when they wrote their papers, now graduate students), or the E865, folder, or take a trip through the detector . If you're online there's a rather long paper, with a good introduction, an undergraduate paper by Ingrid Clay of Xavier University, done while in the , REUP-FOM program branch at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville .
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW RAYS OF LIGHT
REFLECT FROM THE E865 CERENKOV COUNTER
MIRRORS, LOOK AT THE MIRRORS AND TRY IT
YOURSELF. REMEMBER, ANGLE OF INCIDENCE = ANGLE OF REFLECTION!
Have fun, and thanks for sharing our mirrors, but.
DON'T TOUCH THE MIRROR SURFACES!!!!!
WHAT GOOD is E865? ELEMENTARY PARTICLES? Check Any Use?
What did E865 find out? They pushed down the limit for the
main rare decay K to pi mu electron, by a factor of 10 so far, and
maybe another factor of three coming. To do this they had to study abuot
100,000 million kaon decays. That's a lot, and you won't be surprised
to know that they learned a few other things along the way
What is happening to these mirrors now? They are part of the PhysMoVan project, and will stay at iThemba labs, so other students can learn about them.