QN Postings

In addition to QN Postings, take a look at these blogs related to the Large Hadron collider at CERN:

An American Family in Geneva
Elliot McCrory of Fermilab is posted to Switzerland this year to coordinate between the CMS@FNAL Remote Operations Center and CERN. He writes of life "over there" and the excitement of the LHC startup.

LHC Postings
This is the student blog of LHC Online, the QuarkNet project to bring the LHC to students and teachers. It will feature posts by students, teachers, and physicists. Give it a look!

Yesterday, QuarkNet mentor Helio Takai of the Brookhaven-Stony Brook center took this picture of comet McNaught, which is now visible especially at dusk just after the sun sets.

This Space.com article tells you more about the comet and how to spot it:
The Great Comet of 2007.

No word from Dr. Takai yet on whether he's been able to get evidence of a passive radar signal bouncing off the comet.

Comet McNaught (small dot high in image)
set against the horizon.











Magnified detail.

They announced it this past Friday at Fermilab. A press release went out today. And, at the Boston QuarkNet meeting tonight, mentors Darien Wood and Ela Barberis explained what it meant.


"It" is the first evidence of production of single top quarks (not top-antitop pairs) by D-Zero at Fermilab. This means that they have likely observed top quarks produced by weak interactions for the first time ever. (The other events recorded have all been due to the strong force.) This is big in itself and can get bigger because it helps clear the way to possible discovery of Higgs events.

How cool is this? It's swimming in a helium lake.

Links:

Fermilab press release

D-Zero

Below are some photos Tom took in Kyoto. They speak for themselves...

After Nagoya, Tom and Marge and I came to Taipei, Taiwan to do the cosmic ray detector workshop at Soochow University. Our host, Dr. Hsiao, could not have been nicer or more helpful. The team that worked on detectors and the e-Lab were just great. I can't say enough about how interested everyone has been and how nice they are. Of course, here are some pictures...


The last image is of dinner we had at a "dumpling" restaurant -- how cool is that? --with Dr. W.Y. Pauchy Hwang. Dr. Hwang is the PI of the cosmology/astroparticle group at National Taiwan University. Dr. Hwang was fun to talk with and was showed real interest in the workshop.

Thank you to all our friends in Taiwan! All in all, a great week.


Ken

Tom, Marge, and I just completed a cosmic ray workshop at Nagoya University for area physics teachers, hosted by Dr. Nakamura of Nagoya University (who does cool work on the OPERA neurtino experiment at CERN and Gran Sasso). The group could not have been more fun to work with. Here are a few photos...






And if you'd like to see a cool video, try the demo some teachers made of a chaotic gymnast.

-- Ken

Things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving:




Siemens student science competition. (Congratulations, Notre Dame Center)





AAPT student competition.(Congratulations, Annie Rubino, Fermilab/U. Chicago Center)





New student competition for Teragrid.

• All QuarkNet centers that requested a Cosmic Ray Detector now have one.
• We have 52 QuarkNet centers encompassing 76 mentors and 560 teachers plus 5 staff teachers and 4 principal investigators.
• There will be 52 QuarkNet Fellows to help the QuarkNet Staff teachers to invigorate centers in a variety of ways. Sign up by Dec. 4.
• The new 5-year QuarkNet grant proposal to NSF is almost done!

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• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has installed over 1000 magnets and has cryogenics to run them.
• The 4 Tesla toroidal magnet at ATLAS has been fired up after being cooled to 4.8 K.
• The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is moving underground.
• Click to see the stories of the above.

• Modern and particle physics are being taught in high schools and, hopefully, your students are more interested because of it.
• High school physics students are excited about learning because of the differences you have made so far this year.
• High school physics teachers are more confident about teaching physics because of the differences mentors have made.

Have a Happy and Restful Thanksgiving,
Beth