QuarkNet

"QuarkNet" is a research-based high energy physics (HEP) teacher education project in the United States jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy since 1999. QuarkNet operates as a partnership of high school teachers and mentor physicists working in the field of high energy physics at universities and national laboratories across the United States. It aims to provide long-term professional development for local high school physics teachers through research experiences and workshops as well as sustained support over many years. Through these activities, the teachers enhance their knowledge and understanding of science and technology research and then transfer this experience to their classrooms, engaging their students in both the substance and processes of contemporary research. The teachers get academic credit towards their professional development for their participation. QuarkNet programs are designed and conducted according to “best practices” described in the National Research Council (NRC) National Science Education Standards report (1995).

Goals and organization

The QuarkNet project was originally based on university and laboratory “centers,” with physicist mentors who are participating in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experimental collaborations (ATLAS and CMS) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and the Tevatron experimental collaborations (DØ and CDF) at Fermilab. It has since expanded to also include centers with participation in other experiments in high energy physics ("HEP" - also called particle physics) that are broadly representative of the field.

Marjorie Bardeen, of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, serves as the spokesperson and is one of the four Principal Investigators (PIs). The PIs form the management team which lays out the project, works to secure funding, provides reports to the funding agencies, responds to requests for information and represents the project at reviews. The project management team is supported by a staff of 5 that organizes and administers the program by visiting the 51 QuarkNet centers and helping them to meet the QuarkNet goals.

Cosmic Ray e-Lab

One component of QuarkNet is the Cosmic Ray e-Lab. Participating schools set up a cosmic ray detector somewhere at the school, connected to a PC computer which can be connected to the Internet. Students manage data collection with the detector and then arrange to upload the data to a central server. They can also download data from all of the detectors in the cluster, and then use these data for investigative studies, such as determining the (mean) lifetime of muons, the overall flux of muons in cosmic rays, or a study of extended air showers.

Interactions in Understanding the Universe (I2U2)

Based on the success of the initial QuarkNet e-Lab, the creators of QuarkNet have started a new project called Interactions in Understanding the Universe which is attempting to create a new generation of e-Labs which make use of data collected by active physics experiments such as the ATLAS experiment and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), and the [http://www.star.bnl.gov/ STAR experiment] at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

External links

* [http://quarknet.fnal.gov/ QuarkNet]
* [http://ed.fnal.gov/ Fermilab Education Office]
* [http://ed.fnal.gov/uueo/i2u2.html Interactions in Understanding the Universe]