QuarkNet July 2010 Najla Mackie & Tahirah Murphy

Introduction Staff  Ray Brockhaus, PhD in Organic Chemistry  Richard Lasky, Electrical engineer  Mahmoud Bader, Mechanical Engineer Teacher: Mike Niedballa, Michigan Collegiant

… Students:  Maha Hamid, Fordson High School  Najla Mackie, Fordson High School  Steve Chao, Grosse Ile High School  Tahirah Murphy, DuBois High School Groups: 1. Najla & Tahirah 2. Maha & Steve

Our Goal To become familiar with cosmic rays, muons, quarks, and to use HyperTerminal to collect data, enter the data into Microsoft Excel and run tests (Plateau, Flux, Performance, and Shower studies) based on the information.

 We took apart the detector boards to see what they were like and then reassembled them to become familiar with the equipment.

Equipment

First Study: Plateau  When plateauing, we have to look for where the coincidence counts level off, or “plateau”  In order to find the plateau value, we had to constantly change the voltage, by.02, to get a coincidence value for two voltage values.

5000 Series Plateau  We plateaued using the 5000 series and since we had two possible plateau values, one between 0.7 and 0.75 volts and the other between 0.80 and 0.85 volts, we had to plateau again.

6000 Series Plateau  We had to plateau using the 6000 series since the 5000 series was not working correctly  Plateau value= 1.7  When we ran the equipment at 1.7 volts, we had too much noise and we plateaued for the third time and we have 0.90 as our new plateau value.

Our performance study looks pretty good. Channel 2 has the highest peak, which occurs at 12 Nano Seconds. There is a lot of data and counts.

Definition of a Flux Study  A flux study measures the rate particles hit. The number of particles per meter 2 per time (60 seconds)  During flux studies, the detectors record the arrival time of the muons

We ran Channel One. This flux study shows 6000 to 7000 events/m 2 /per minute for the rate of flux.

This shower study shows that there was six hits. This result shows when the shower hit the panels within the same time frame. We could conclude that the direction of the shower was from the North West to South East.

CERN VS. Fermilab CERN  European Organization for Nuclear Research  Founded in 1954  Sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva  27 km  20 member states  Uses LHC (Large Hadron Collider) Fermilab  3 km  Batavia, Illinois  Uses the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF)  224 institutions from 38 states

CERN’s LHC  The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator  Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles travel at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another

Fermilab’s CDF  The CDF detector is used to study the products of such collisions; by doing this they try to reconstruct what happened in the collision and ultimately try to figure out how matter is put together and what forces nature uses to create the world around us

CERN & Fermilab

What We Learned  How to use the detector boards to capture data from muon showers, and how to put that data into graphs and charts.  The smaller particles that make up the nucleus of an atom  Quarks and Leptons –they are the most fundamental types of particles; they are divided into 6 flavors corresponding to 3 generations of matter –For every lepton and quark there is an antiparticle that corresponds with it –A Quark is really the building blocks of a proton.  Gluons hold Quarks together (like glue)  A Proton has 3 quarks, 2 up and 1 down. The upper quark has a +2/3 charge and the lower quark has a -1/3 charge.  Quarks can not be free  Quarks combine to make the basic building blocks: Baryons and Mesons –Lepton  Includes a neutrino- low mass, no charge, and a weak interaction

 We learned a lot about muons  Muon’s pass through all the chambers above to reach the Earth  Fun Fact: Approximately one cosmic ray muon passes through your thumbnail every minute!

Learned Continued… Higgs Boson  is a missing particle that nuclear/high energy particle physicists wants to find.  Is hard to find because it is not readily produced, because it takes very special conditions to create it  Mass is the only unknown characteristic needed to complete the Standard Model and nuclear/high energy particle physicists hope to find the Higgs Boson to validate it

Relativity Two theories –Special Relativity –General Relativity

Special Relativity Is based on two postulates 1.The laws of physics are the same at the same reference area 2.The speed of light in a vacuum is all the same at the same reference area Involves length contraction –At the speed of light, objects appear shorter than they would as when stationary or at a slower moving speed

General Relativity  Is the geometric theory of gravitation  Time moves slowly in gravitation fields  Beams of light are bent as they travel though gravitational fields * We live in General Relativity

The End!