April 19, 2018
Meeting Summary
Prepared by M. Bardeen
Krzysztof Wozniak, CREDO; Carolin Schwerdt, ICD & Teichenwelt; Marcello Abbrescia & Rosario Nania, EEE; Sabine Hemmer, INFN Padua; Charles Timmermans, HISPARC; Mark Adams & Marge Bardeen, QuarkNet & IMW.
We decided to continue to hold a steering group meeting at the spring IPPOG meeting. In addition, Carolin will hold a videoconference sometime in September to kick off International Cosmic Day and hear from other projects, and Mark will hold a videoconference in January to kick off International Muon Week and hear from other projects.
ICD - https://icd.desy.edu (Caro)
A one-day event usually in November brings astroparticle physics outreach and education projects together from national partners all over the world. Students use their own detectors. ICD provides:
Registration webpage
Suggested agenda
Template for proceedings - zenith angle measurement
Student certificates
Proceeding booklet
Videoconferences - 1 each in Asia, Europe and America
In 2017 there were 1550 students in 89 groups from 12 countries. It was the first year that EEE participated with more than 550 students from 47 schools gathering at 9 meeting points. Padua had 200 students, but they could not participate in the videoconference. Experiments such as IceCube and ATLAS can present their data on zenith angle dependence to students. Carolin welcomes suggestions for experiments to participate.
IMW- IMW participants (Mark)
A one-week opportunity for students to take data for several days during the week and share with peers from all over the world. Sites are eligible for a video conference the following week.
IMW provides:
Registration webpage
Measurements: Historically muon flux; this year added muon speed.
Upload website
Videoconferences to discuss results
12 sites participated when the number is usually around 45. Why? The muon speed measurement required more student interaction with the detectors as well as a more complicated analysis. EEE schools still plan contribute to the muon speed results even though they were given short notice this year. Mark welcomes suggestions for additional themes for IMW next year and hopes to increase Global Cosmics participation.
Discussion:
Communication is an issue. It takes time to organize these events both for the projects and local sites. Since these are held annually, organizers can get the word out early to everyone. People learned about IMW too late. EEE communicated with students and hopes to have them present something in May. It is exciting for students to present findings in English.
Some issues revolve around managing the length of the event, engagement with a large number of people, and how to upload material. Can we improve overlap between ICD and IMW? Are they too complementary?
DESY had as many as 12 participants in one videoconference. That was too many. Should they offer more? The model of a videoconference where only one person is talking at a time does not optimize engagement. There is also a language problem. Another suggestion would be to use this time for the students to prepare their report for the booklet.
IMW was held one week earlier and included a speed of muon measurement that may have been too challenging. This could have been the reason for fewer participants. Also, the announcement to IPPOG Global Cosmics members was later than the one for the QuarkNet members. Some felt it was not too difficult to measure speed of muon but took time to set up.
Project Updates
In addition to written updates from John Wilson at U Birmingham and For QuarkNet Taiwan, we had the following verbal reports:
Cosmic@Web Portal - http://cosmicatweb.desy.de (Caro)
Online platform for evaluation of data from experiments that measure particles 24/7. Includes introduction, experiment descriptions, data description, glossary and plotting tool.
Soon available in English. A dataset is provided which enables participation in ICD.
Netzwerk Teilchenwelt - http://www.teilchenwelt.de (Caro)
Scientific coordination of a German network with 20 intuitions, 50 scintillator detectors. Students can come to the institute or teachers can bring detector to their school. The idea is that students should have their own “scientific” work. They can use the QuarkNet e-lab but use their own laptop. We also have astroparticle masterclasses with Pierre Auger or IceCube data.
CREDO - https://credo.science (Krzysztof)
Our motivation is to measure correlated air showers registered at large areas. We look for coincidences for global phenomena and are willing to include data from other projects. (Mark needs to follow up regarding QuarkNet data.) Currently, there are 1,106 users (not all active) and 141 teams who have made 608,000 detections, mostly noise.
We are starting a new project to create comic ray detectors with smart phones. The smart phones seem to be a good device or starting point. We are also developing analysis tools on our webpage, “the Dark Universe.” A detector app is available for Android, with iPhone coming in English.
We are also working with Cosmic Watch (Cosmicwatch.lns.mit.edu), a do-it-yourself detector for <$100. A base plus 5 watches would give precision of ~10ns and cost $350. The software is open source with license from MIT. The rate is 1/hour as the sensors are not very big. We are working on the challenge of distinguishing signal from background.
EU Horizon 2020 – Citizen Science agenda - We are preparing to send a proposal next year. It is now based on the smart phone and the involvement of the citizens using the Dark Universe website, but we are open for suggestions.
EEE - https://eee.centrofermi.it (Marcello)
The Project Extreme Energy Events - Science inside Schools (EEE), is a special research activity about the origin of cosmic rays, performed in collaboration with CERN, INFN and MIUR and carried out with the essential contribution of high school teachers and students. At CERN teachers and students have built 52 of the 54-57 current detectors. About 50 physicists and 104 high schools with about 200 teachers and 2000 students participate each year. We are making an upgrade adding 20 stations. We have collected more than 65 billion events. Data are sent to INFN-CNAF for analysis. Many studies are ongoing, and several results have been published in scientific journals.
Local schools with detectors have a responsibility to organize day-by-day telescope data taking and monitoring. Schools without telescopes are paired with schools with telescopes. A special agreement between Centro Fermi and the schools makes all these activities fall in the Alternating School and Work protocol of the Italian Ministry for Education. Monthly Vidyo meetings keep schools informed on the progress of the experiment. Schools from Albania and Russia have taken part at CERN with detector construction as their CERN visit coincided with Italian school visits. In May and December 2017, two conferences were held at Erice, Sicily. Each conference had about 150 teachers and students from 45 schools. In May students measured the radius of the Earth, and in December they studied the variation of flux with altitude.
A recent agreement with the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain started a collaboration to use the EEE data to correlate cosmic rays with atmosphere properties.
During July-August, the PolarQuest2018 mission will follow the route of the ITALIA airship to the North Pole, 90 years after its crash. Running a small detector made by scintillators will measure the cosmic ray flex at high latitude during this trip by small ship. Students from Italy, Switzerland and Norway will build three detectors at CERN. Detectors will also be in Norway and Italy in order to allow a simultaneous measurement of the cosmic-rays flux over almost forty latitude degrees.
HISPARC - http://www.hisparc.nl/en/ (Charles)
HiSPARC is a project in which secondary schools and academic institutions join forces and form a network to measure cosmic rays with extremely high energy. There are detectors at around 100 schools. All our data is publically available. HiSPARC mainly provides modules for the regular curriculum in Dutch high schools. However, the RouteNet material has been translated to be suitable for British high schools. We are developing a Cherenkov detector with which students can experiment using different detector mediums. They do this as an introduction to the rooftop detector array.
QuarkNet - https://quarknet.org (Mark)
Cosmic Ray e-Lab - http://www.i2u2.org/elab/cosmic/home/project.jsp
QuarkNet has hundreds of detectors with 4-scintillator packages and an e-Lab to provide the online environment in which students experience the excitement of scientific collaboration. Any teacher can have an account and set up accounts for his or her students. Students design their own experiments, take data and upload data to the e-Lab. They can use data from other students in their experiments. Data is open and available on the e-lab. There are analysis tools for a performance study to check the detector and then flux, shower, muon lifetime and time of flight studies.
2017 Solar Eclipse Project - If you are not using your detector this year, would you like a reason to put it back online and have students use it for education purposes? The eclipse event created a lot of interest. Nobody had done this experiment before. Nature provided an off-on “switch” to any cosmic rays from the sun. We took data from 56 detectors prepared by 48 QuarkNet groups. Students designed 3 detectors: there were 4 tracking telescopes, over 20 fixed-angle telescopes and the rest were vertically stacked. Students had to design the detectors to cost no more than $100 from materials available at a hardware store. Students did a lot of background studies to compare rates during eclipse under different conditions. The experiment saw no change in rate in the sun’s direction at the 3% level.