2002-2003
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Candy Accelerators In spring of 2002, HU QuarkNet teachers Deborah Roudebush and Hank Horn built "candy accelerators" with their students at West Springfield High School. After this effort to pioneer the candy accelerators originally designed at SMU for Virginia teachers, Deborah and Hank worked with the other HU QuarkNet teachers in our summer 2002 workshop so that everyone could build them. The "fixed target" accelerator uses pressure from a CO2 fire extinguisher to fire a piece of hard candy at a brick. The "collider" fires two pieces of hard candy at each other. To learn more, go to http://quarknet.fnal.gov/toolkits/ati/jawbreaker.html. |
 The Collider group at West Springfield High School. |
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Cosmic Ray Detector construction The construction and use of cosmic ray detectors has been an important part of QuarkNet. Indeed, as part of the HU Associate Teacher Institute, teachers took cosmic ray flux readings at altitudes from sea level to 1000 m during a trip from Hampton to the Blue Ridge using a "Berkeley" portable detector. Later, HU QuarkNet teachers decided to build their own Berkeley detector, making their own unique enclosure for it. Substantial progress was made in the summer 2003 workshop; testing was performed at a meeting at the Science Museum of Virginia under the direction of mentor Ken McFarlane. More information on the Berkeley detector, including a graph of muon flux vs altitude to which HU teacher contributed, is available at http://www.lbl.gov/abc/cosmic/. |
 Deborah Roudebush and Ken McFarlane testing a cosmic ray counter. |
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Meetings and Events We've taken our show on the road in a number of different ways. First, because we are a geographically diverse center, we've had our meetings at Hampton University in the Hampton Roads region, Lee High School in the northern part of the commonwealth, and the Science Museum of Virginia, centrally located in Richmond. We also participated in the QuarkNet Regional Symposium at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the QuarkNet workshop at the SpacePart03 conference in Washington DC. Most recently, we had a joint meeting with Fairfax county physics teachers and members of the University of Maryland QuarkNet center, where we made plans to particpate in MARIACHI (Mixed Apparatus for Radio Investigation of Cosmic-rays of High Ionization), based at Brookhaven National Laboratory. More information on MARIACHI is available at http://www-mariachi.physics.sunysb.edu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. |
