QN Postings

My last evening at CERN included the official ATLAS dinner. It was held in the Globe -truly a remarkable piece of architecture. Constructed almost entirely of wood, it was a gift to CERN by the Swiss Confederation to mark the Laboratory's 50th anniversary in 2004. The external shell was recycled from the Swiss Pavilion of Expo 2000 in Hanover. Over 2000 cubic meters of wood was used in its construction. It currently houses the "100 years After Einstein" exhibit. The winding interior ramp leads up to the main exhibit area. The picture below shows Fred Olness (SMU) and Michael observing one of the 6 acts who performed for us that night.

Dinner consisted of a traditional Swiss dish called Tartiflette (potatoes,cheese,cream, bacon,onions). It was cooked on-site in HUGE skillets (see below).


We also had platters of meat and cheese with fresh, crusty bread on each table to munch on.
Kegs of beer and wine were abundant, and a great time was had by all. Who says physicists don't know how to have fun???


The next morning, I flew back home. We made a lot of contacts and learned a lot about the current status of ATLAS and CMS. This was most definitely a trip worth taking.

Bob and Tom had to depart on Wednesday, so I (Kris) had a bit of time on my own. Michael Barnett arranged a covert tour of building 180 which houses a number of components of ATLAS under assembly. Once again, the size of this detector is ENORMOUS. I really didn't grasp that until I saw the detector in the cavern and then the pieces in bldg 180. We saw muon detector panels in various stages of construction. Note the size of just ONE of the panels compared to the size of our intrepid PI, Michael.

We also snuck into an area where they were working on the endcaps for the toroid magnets. Again, the size was amazing.

While at CERN, staff teacher Bob Peterson discovered that the Holy Grail of Sailing , the America's Cup, was on display at a small yacht club in Geneva. So, off we went in search of the cup. Two bus rides later, we found ourselves at the Societe Nautique de Geneve.

Afterwards, we walked a while through the town


then returned to CERN for a tour of CMS and a meeting with Karl Gill. Karl is working on CMS outreach and had terrific ideas for a comic book.


We then had our ATLAS outreach meeting, followed by wine and cheese and a look at the new ATLAS exhibit.

Tom, Bob and Kris ( along with PI Michael Barnett) traveled to CERN Feb 19th-23rd for ATLAS week (held 3 times/year in various locations). The meeting included an education outreach session during which Tom presented the QuarkNet Program's involvement with e-labs. Also on the itinerary were tours of ATLAS (shown here) and CMS as well as trips to Geneva's Old Town and dinner in France. We met with several QN mentors (Fred Olness-SMU, Stu Loken-LBNL and Helio Takai-BNL, to name a few) as well as a former BBC documentary filmmaker who was in town to work on his film about ATLAS.

QN Postings

Yet Another Alaska Pic

And here is Jeff Chorney's moose!



-- Marge

My daughter Maria just sent this picture she had taken in Alaska from the day after her AAPT presentation (which went very well, thank you). She had gone cross-country, uh, cross-tundra skiing with NSF Operative Maria Niland and Jefferson Lab Guru Steve Gagnon. The photo reminded me of all the nifty phenomena we saw in Alaska: vertical refraction of light from mercury-vapor lamps, snowflake crystals that perfectly reflected the color of the light that hit them, and rainbows on the horizon in daytime. Ice crystals in the air do the neatest things.
-- Ken

I am here at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center with about 10 high school students, 4 teachers, 2 technicians and 1 geeky physicist. The group has come together for their 3rd week of learning about computer clusters or networks.

The students are currently networking 4 Pentium III computers. They have already installed the cluster software and the Linux operating system. Once they have the network up and running, they will learn about parallel programming so they can take advantage of the speed of the cluster.

When they understand the system they have built, different groups will be using it in different ways. One group is planning to search for extra-solar planets, another to design games and another to overlay Hubble photos to create false color images to search for stuff in outer space.

Wow! Students, teachers and scientists giving up 2 hours a week for just plain learning. This is education at its best!

Beth