QN Postings

Long Island has for many years been home to people from Europe: you can still get great Italian bread and superb Black Forest cake at bakeries within a short walk of each other, and that is just Lindenhurst. Last week, Europe came to Long Island again in the form of the European Particle Physics Outreach Group (EPPOG) Masterclass, in which groups of high school students analyze data from CERN and compare results via internet videoconference. The whole event (pun intended) is run from CERN and has in past years only included students in Europe. This year, one of the results of Beth and Ken's December visit to CMS week was a kind offer by Silvia Schuh (ATLAS) and Dave Barney (CMS) to include US students. Michael Kobel (Bonn) made the arrangements and sent out the data. The first ever group of US students to participate in the EPPOG Masterclass was an intrepid team of six juniors at Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, NY (north shore of Long Island) lead by Tania Entwistle, a physics teacher there and a member of the Brookhaven-Stony Brook QuarkNet center. The students geared up with coaching by Tania, a talk by QuarkNet mentor Helio Takai, and an after school data analysis session on Tuesday 14 March. The morning of Wednesday 15 March (late afternoon in Europe), the students were off the Brookhaven for their videocon with the moderators at CERN (including Silvia!) and students at sites in Greece, Poland, and


Slovakia. They were joined at Brookhaven by Tania, Helio, QuarkNet staffers Kris Whelan and Ken Cecire, U.S. ATLAS Deputy Project Manager Howard Gordon, and Brookhaven Education Director Ken White. Scott Bronson of Public Affairs set up the videoconference equipment and stayed to help make it all work. Even though the other groups were larger, the Ward Melville group studied nearly as many events and came up with very similar results for the branching ratios of the Z-boson based on event pictures from LEP. The students followed up with lunch at Berkner Hall (the Brookhhaven cafeteria) and a tour of the magnet lab. Many thanks go to all but especially to our particle physics data analysis group from Ward Melville: Ari Richman, Stephen Bohlman, Lucas Janson, Joshua Steinberg, Sammi Qin, Ram Gupta, and coach Tania Entwistle.