QN Postings

After returning from CERN, I went to a meeting of the Boston University - Northeasern University QuarkNet center at Roxbury Latin School. Rick Dower and company were kind enough to let me make a presentation, the main portion of which can be found at

http://www.jlab.org/~cecire/qncern/qncern.html

You'll see some pictures that are on this blog plus some content you may not have seen yet. The aim was and is to get teacher ideas about how we can excite our QuarkNet students about the runup to the LHC. Those ideas are very much wanted! The Boston group did a good job with that and more good ideas are eagerly sought. Send them to me or any of the QN staff or post them as comments on the blog.

-- Ken

It is late Saturday night. Beth and QuarkNet PI Dan Karmgard left early this morning and I spent today in Zurich, where I met my nephew Tadahiro, who lives in Stuttgart. There were 2 interesting physics education moments in that visit. More on that below.

As usual, it is great to work with Beth and we ended up with several good ideas inspired by the work of the people we met here. The CERN folks who do outreach and education are full-time physicists who care about getting the word out about particle physics. They are great people. The folks in the Press Office were also quite helpful and, for me, Connie Potter in the ATLAS Secretariat was a main source of assistance. It was also great to get to know Dan and Beth's husband Jeff better. They are both great guys with the sort of sense of humor that keeps the job fun.

Now if you've followed this blog you've seen ATLAS and CMS and la Pomme de la Mort. But you have not yet seen The Bear that Blows Bubbles in the shopping mall in Val Thoiry or the view from Top of Zurich. The Bear that Blows Bubbles is here:

The Bear that Blows Bubbles in Val Thoiry

and the view from Top of Zurich is here:


So, the two physics education moments:

1. I presented my nephew with a baseball cap souvenir from CERN. It was a teachable moment in which I got to explain about the LHC. He asked about the CERN symbol, which allowed us to talk about the difference between fixed-target and collider experiments. (Check out the logo at the top of this post and see why.)

2. A fellow we met waiting for the train back to the city noticed the cap and asked if Tadahiro worked at CERN. In the discussion that followed, the gentleman, an IT guy, allowed that if he'd had good physics and chemistry teachers in high school he would have gone into the natural sciences instead. Dude.

More later, even though we temporarily say au revoir to CERN...

-- Ken

We had a meeting this evening with Silvia Schuh and she had some interesting things to share about ATLAS, CERN, and education. Silvia works on muon physics for ATLAS and works on outreach and education as well.

The conversation generated some ideas that you will, we hope, see bearing fruit in the coming months. We had a small meeting of QuarkNet mentors this evening at the CERN cafeteria. Pictured here are (L to R) Jeff and Beth Marchant, Lawrence Pinsky (University of Houston QN mentor), and Dan Karmgard (Notre Dame; QuarkNet PI). We had a nice time talking and getting to know Lawrence better. It was fun and the cheese -- purchased from the "Champion" restaurant -- was pretty good. We then went to St. Genis for dinner where we encountered a large Christmas decoration the looks like a cross between an apple and the Death Star. Hence: Pomme du Mort, or, more properly, Pomme de la Mort. If you can think of a better name, well, never mind. I like this name. Tomorrow we meet Dave Barney, who does CMS education and outreach and run errands.

-- Ken

Well, I finally made it to CERN. Beth and I met yesterday afternoon and immediately had a great, if short, look at ATLAS in the cavern, some ~100 m below the surface on the Swiss side of CERN. This was pretty exciting for me, as all the toroidal magnets have been installed. Last time I looked (in July 2005), only the bottom half were in.

Many thanks to Silvia Schuh of ATLAS, who arranged for us to come and took us around.

We met up with Dan Karmgard and Beth's husband Jeff later and went to the CMS Christmas party. CMS is on the French side, so the hors d'ourves were pretty good. It was right at the base of the CMS detector,

which, unlike ATLAS, is above ground. I suppose I should explain: ATLAS is bigger then CMS (though both are simply huge, or, in physics terms, "way big") and is being assembled in its cavern in the beamline. CMS is being assembled above the ground and will be lowered as a whole into its place, also about 100 m down. The pictures the the right is of the party at the base of the detector.

To get more exciting details from Beth and Lucien on CMS, visit these short MPG videos:

Lucien
Beth

More soon...

-- Ken

Following the daily meetings, the CMS-types gather in the CERN restaurant for wine - it's on tap - and a recap and debrief of the days discoveries. Generally, the discoveries are of the type that a certain part isn't installed yet or a certain process can't be started because of a delay on something else.



Tonight, we ate dinner - an event that doesn't start until about 8:00 pm (20:00 here) that follows the after-meeting wine gathering - at La Crete de la Neige. They serve a 1/2 wheel of raclette cheese on a rack under a heated bar. The melted cheese is scraped off onto people's plates and eaten with potatoes, ham and/or bread. Four of us attacked the raclette and were only able to work our way 1/2 way down. Poor Dan, one of our QuarkNet PIs, had a little too much cheese!

I attended the CMS Plenary Session which gave an overview of the status of CMS. The whole thing is given in English - a distinct advantage since I am just now getting used to using my full French vocabulary - Bonjour, Merci, Oui, Je voudrais . . . (with a lot of pointing), S'il vous plait and Au revoir.

The meeting was cool - physicists (and me) filled the auditorium plus sat on the steps to hear the opening remarks by Michel Della Negra, head of CMS. There were over 300 people in the room. I am always amazed at the fact that while the common language is English, there are probably 40 or more languages spoken by the members of the group.

Some highlights of the meeting:
- "CMS will be ready for beam July, 2007" - M. Della Negra
- The PC "farm" will be ready 1 July 2007
- A load test will soon be done for the new gantry (permanent crane) to test for 2500 kTon!!
- In case of a fire, the entire CMS cavern will be filled with foam in 15 minutes! (Remember that the detector is about 5-6 STORIES tall!) When the speaker added that once the foam had dissipated and the fire was completely extinguished, the experiment could be started up again, the room erupted with laughter:)


Outreach (some plans):
On-line displays of: events, status of experiment, status of LHC (accelerator).
Large area white walls for projection of images in building 510 for permanent outreach area.

Check later for pictures,
Beth

QuarkNet teacher Dave Trapp recently wrote to us:

Best of wishes for your trip to CERN. I visited there about 3 weeks ago primarily to discuss collaboration for putting systematic physics instruction on the WEB...Ulrich Fuchs, Data Acquisition systems, provideda great tour of ATLAS, the anti-proton facilities, and the main computer center. His tour was one most science teachers "would die for."

He continues:

Incidentally, I also visited GSI where I discussed the chemistry part of this Web science project and I got to tail a chemistry team for a day as they used the linear accelerator to synthesize and identify heavy isotopes, and learn chemistry (using ion exchange resin and electroplating) as each single atom is made.

When you get a chance, ask Dave about his travels and work in Africa.

It's the wee hours of Tuesday and I'm in South Carolina after a good meeting with the USC group. Tomorrow I'll be at CERN!

-- Ken

Wow! After 2 days of being at CERN, I finally have internet access! I didn't know I could make it for 2 whole days without e-mail and the internet - but I made it:)

Watch the Beyond Einstein world wide webcast from CERN today at
http://beyond-einstein.web.cern.ch/beyond-einstein/.

Beth is leaving for CERN today and Ken will follow on Tuesday, after a stop at the South Carolina QuarkNet center on Monday. Here is some of what we'll be up to:

Wednesday:
tour of ATLAS
CMS Christmas Party

Thursday:
meet with CMS and ATLAS outreach people
reception for QuarkNet mentors at the CMS meeting

All days:
CMS meeting
Other activities

If you can think of some good -- and by good I mean bad -- lyrics for a particle physics carol to bring to the CMS party, well, go ahead and e-mail it to one of us.