Speaker
Description
HiSPARC (see http://www.hisparc.nl/en/) involves schools across Europe in real scientific research, and won the European Physical Society HEP outreach prize in 2007. It was born more than a decade ago in the Netherlands, with ongoing participation of over 100 schools. Relatively recently, HiSPARC has been introduced to UK, with a network of schools forming mainly in the Midlands/South West. HiSPARC-UK began in the Bristol area in early 2011, as part of the cosmic ray centenary, and attracted support from the South-West HE-STEM programme, AWE, the IoP and the University of Bristol. The project expanded to the Birmingham area in 2014 with support from the University of Birmingham and the Odgen Trust. In 2016 the network expanded to Wales (Cardiff & Swansea), with a grant from the Welsh Assembly. The UK network has thus increased rapidly and currently has 25 schools (15 in the South-West in and around Bristol, 7 in Birmingham, and 2 in Wales and 1 in East Sussex). So far, each school is provided with components for a rooftop, research-quality, cosmic ray detector (costing £5k). This comprises a pair of scintillators and phototubes, and an Internet-connected ADC / GPS unit that uploads data to a central database. Schools first construct the apparatus, and then operate and maintain it over several years, therefore gaining valuable knowledge of particle physics detector techniques and methods, and exploiting our academic research links to CERN (Birmingham, Bristol, Sussex) and our long-standing expertise in detectors and particle/astroparticle research.
