Quarknet Proposal (University of Pittsburgh) ------------------------------- **************************************** Section 1 - General Information **************************************** Date Submitted: Mon Nov 5 15:20:42 2001 Institution: University of Pittsburgh Group: Department of Physics and Astronomy Postal Address: 100 Allen Hall University of Pittsburgh City, State, Zip: Pittsburgh, PA, 15260 Department Phone: 412-624-9060, Fax: 412-624-9163 Individuals Involved: Julia A. Thompson, Jeffrey E. McDonald, Donna Naples, David Kraus Electronic copies sent to: jth@pitt.edu, jemcdon@pitt.edu, naples@farfalle.phyast.pitt.edu, kraus@pitt.edu Julia A. Thompson, Jeffrey E. McDonald were identified as local QuarkNet leaders. ------------------------- Outreach Narrative ------------------------- 1) Thompson works actively with high school teachers in southern Illinois, through Southern University Illinois Edwardsville, helping them to develop hands-on activities of interest. This work has been carried on since approximately 1997, when she worked over the course of a year with the physics teacher at an E. St. Louis high school. Projects developed have ranged from levers to basic electricity to optics to more advanced oscilloscope and sound labs. She also, on request, helps teachers inventory and refurbish their hands-on equipment. In the past year she contacted approximately 400 students through these activities, including about 200 through the E. St. Louis Upward Bound program. In the coming year she will work with these Upward Bound students and advise them in their preparation of science fair projects. 2) In the past year, Thompson and Kraus worked with Ms. Julie Breden of Southwest High School, introducing cosmic ray detectors into her classroom. Through about 4 visits with students present, and additional visits to set up equipment, the students built and tested scintillator paddles, including checking the ambient cosmic ray flux with them. Ms. Breden presented this work at the spring AAPT meeting at Elsah, Illinois, and continued work with Thompson and Kraus in the summer through the REU program described below. 3) Thompson is also the director of the Pitt/SIUE REUP-FOM program, an NSF REU program which focusses on recruitment and support of minorities and women with physics interests and aptitudes. Through an RET supplement to this program, and also through a Research Corporation Grant, high school teachers in the past have collaborated with Thompson and Kraus on their research. One teacher, Ivan Ober from Mt. Lebanon school district in Pittsburgh, was a co-author on the instrumentation paper describing the rare kaon decay experiment, E865 and BNL. 4) In the past, Thompson advised the local SPS chapter at Pittsburgh, which won nationally competitive grants for their outreach work with Pittsburgh high schools and students and preparation of a video called "What a Physicist Does". She also initiated the Pitt participation in the local Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science Saturday workshops, in which high school students spend 4 separate Saturday mornings, each on at a different physics activity. She has also worked with elementary and middle school teachers and students. 5)McDonald was the group leader of the Young Physicists Outreach group at the Snowmass 2001 meeting. The assignment was to evaluate the current outreach programs and develop a plan for outreach activities by interested young physicists. Several documents have been developed from these efforts at Snowmass. He also participated in outreach activities at the Snowmass conference. 6)McDonald currently is the director of the young physicists project at the University of Pittsburgh. Outreach activities, along with other young physicists issues, are the focus of his effort. His outreach interests include participating with high school teachers, students and parents. He also is interested in the development of active education tools/display material for the high school classroom. 7) McDonald actively participates in regional science fairs and has actively promoted high energy physics in opportunities like physics open house and other science outreach programs. ------------------------- Transfer Narrative (How Teachers Might Use The Experience in the Classroom) ------------------------- 1) Teachers choosing to continue work on the cosmic ray detector project would naturally continue into the classroom, with a basic detector, for which our group currently has enough pieces to build at least two. Our idea is that classes would collect information and share it, and gradually a larger network will be developed. Individual teachers may also have projects to improve data acquisition, gps time stamping, Monte Carlo modelling of cosmic ray showers, data analysis, or even development of alternate detectors. While the shared information is expected to be of scientific interest, a prime goal of our activity is to provide an environment in which students and teachers themselves can develop and influence the future course of this project. 2) Teachers choosing to continue work on some aspect of MINOS would be most likely to contribute through some form of data analysis, during the year, but could continue work with hardware development and testing during the summer. The enhanced experimental skills should transfer back to the classroom in an indirect fashion in general stronger orientation and ease with hands-on activities. ------------------------- The mentor's role in the transfer is ------------------------- 1) Julia Thompson and David Kraus will assist teachers interested in transferring cosmic ray detector activities back to the classroom. We have already inititated some activities along these lines with two teachers in southern Illinois and are prepared to support teachers in inserting either activities or information from the cosmic ray project into the classroom. 2) Donna Naples and Jeffrey McDonald will assist teachers interested in transferring MINOS activities back into the classroom, primarily through providing information about the experiment or identifying appropriate analysis activities. Since southern Illinois is reasonably conveniently located with respect to Fermilab (within an easy day's drive, and conveniently accessible also by train and by inexpensive air fares on Southwest) both Naples and McDonald, who are frequently at FNAL, can continue contacts with the teachers. **************************************************** Section II - Summer Research Information **************************************************** Nature of Research: The teachers would be associated with the MINOS experiment at Fermilab. This is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, designed to give more information about oscillation of neutrinos from one species to another, and about neutrino masses. The University of Pittsburgh group, under the leadership of Prof. Donna Naples, has designed chambers for use in beam monitoring, and is presently doing engineering design, and expects either to build the chambers at Pittsburgh, or to supervise their construction at Fermilab. The teachers will learn about this experiment, its physics objectives, and the specific hardware which is the area of responsiblity of the University of Pittsburgh. The second aspect of the research is CosRayHS, a project to link together simple cosmic ray detectors in associated high schools. By comparing, on a very short time scale (10's of nanoseconds), the time of arrival of different signals, one can search for high energy initial cosmic rays, indicated by widely separated charged particles arriving simultaneously over a large area. The direction of any shower can also be found from these times. Such investigations are of interest because of anomalies seen at the highest cosmic ray energies, and because of some indications of time correlations over extended areas, larger in distance than expected from cosmic rays with energies below the maximum seen. ------------------------ Research Narrative ------------------------ The underlying idea of this proposal is to strengthen the physics skills and knowledge of teachers in the general southern Illinois region served by SIUE, where Thompson is an adjunct professor. No other major high energy groups work in this area, which includes many rural districts as well as bordering on St. Louis and E. St. Louis. We propose a basic 6-week cycle for the lead teachers which would consist of: 1 week at Fermilab, 3 weeks at Pittsburgh or FNAL working on the design and construction of the muon monitoring chambers for MINOS, and 2 weeks at SIUE becoming oriented to the cosmic ray detector work. The additional two weeks of the QUARKNET 8-week period would be negotiated with individual teachers, and could include more time working on MINOS or more time on the cosmic ray detector project. We intend to focus our recruitment efforts on the southern Illinois region with which Thompson is now working actively. Our experience is that these teachers are interested in elementary particle physics, but that projects which allow them to contribute without leaving home (such as the cosmic ray detector project) are attractive. The lead teachers will be assisted in planning the second year workshop on either further aspects of MINOS or on the cosmic ray project, as they decide best. In this first summer, during the MINOS project weeks, the lead teachers can choose from several pad ionization chamber (PIC) development projects according to their own interests. These efforts are to develop electronics, prototype detectors and the acquisition of auxillary information to be used in the analysis of the data from the PIC detectors. Other possibilities include the development of a calibration system for these detectors and the analysis of test beam data based on the proposed detector design. For the cosmic ray project, we anticipate undergraduate participants working on the project through our REU. In the past summer, we brought one station to working order, complete with a GPS time stamp. In the next summer, we expect to commission a second detector and take data with the two stations simultaneously, both with a stack of scintillators and a distributed array, to test the GPS time stamping. Teachers would arrive near the end of this project, would learn about the detectors, and also be oriented as to possible extensions and improvements of detectors, data collections, and GPS time stamping. Jeffrey McDonald and Donna Naples will work with the teachers on the MINOS component and Julia Thompson and David Kraus will work with them on the cosmic ray detector component.