The $100 muon detector

At the Waubonsee Community College campus in Sugar Grove, Illinois, a group of 22 high school and middle school teachers gathered in pairs to pore over data from CERN’s CMS experiment. Over the course of two hours, they classified more than 100 particle physics events, graphed their data and measured the mass of fundamental particles. As schools are gearing back up for the academic year, these teachers will be able to think about how to bring these real-world science experiences into the classroom.

“I want my students to understand the current questions scientists are working on answering and how they are trying to answer them,” teacher Amanda Whaley said.

Whaley is one of seven high school and middle school teachers who attended the Teacher Research Associates, or TRAC, program located at and funded by Fermilab. TRAC has existed since 1983, but in recent years it has taken on an emphasis on turning those lab experiences into lessons or exercises for students. The two-day workshop in Sugar Grove, organized by TRAC in July and funded by U.S. CMS, brought in not just the program’s participants but also 16 teachers from the local area, educating them about models of different physics lessons and information about the frontier of particle physics research.

The TRAC program itself is a roughly eight-week internship program that paired teachers with mentors at Fermilab to gain experience working in a real physics lab setting. The teachers, who could come from any area of science, math, computer science or technology, each contributed individually to projects around the lab.

Harry Cheung, the head of the program since 2010, said the purpose of TRAC as one of Fermilab’s outreach programs is to educate teachers about what happens at physics labs so students can learn about the real-life applications of the subject matter.

“They get concrete examples of how something is useful,” he said. “They get to talk about the things they’ve done here.”

The teachers were able to jump into major projects at the lab. Whaley worked on research and development for a proposed upgrade to the CMS forward hadron calorimeter, which measures the energy of some particles and detects the presence of others. Another teacher worked on a hand-scanned particle event display study for Fermilab’s NOvA neutrino experiment. Another worked on data acquisition for detectors.

Some of the teachers said their experience in the labs reminded them of skills students will need if they choose fields in science. Whaley said she wants to be sure her students can defend their conclusions when pressed. Another teacher, Elizabeth Wenk, was surprised by the amount of time scientists spent in meetings or writing. She plans to emphasize lab reports and communication more in her class.

And several teachers said they gained fresh perspectives on what it’s like to be a student in physics.

“I’ve been teaching the same material for such a long time,” Wenk said. “I have a newfound appreciation and understanding of students who struggle.”

Particle physics can be difficult to incorporate into a standard curriculum, particularly for middle school teachers. But some can use the material in independent study courses or in more advanced physics classes. Chemistry teachers can go from teaching about molecular scales to even smaller ones when teaching students about atoms. And others have thought of less conventional outlets, such as extracurricular programs.

“I’m really excited about trying out the new things I learned,” Wenk said. “It’s really going to change how I think, and it’s going to have a big impact on the students.”

New result indicates that the flavor and mass correlation may be more complex than previously thought.

Scientists from the NOvA collaboration have announced an exciting new result that could improve our understanding of the behavior of neutrinos.

Neutrinos have previously been detected in three types, called flavors – muon, tau and electron. They also exist in three mass states, but those states don’t necessarily correspond directly to the three flavors. They relate to each other through a complex (and only partially understood) process called mixing, and the more we understand about how the flavors and mass states connect, the more we will know about these mysterious particles.

As the collaboration will present today at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago, NOvA scientists have seen evidence that one of the three neutrino mass states might not include equal parts of muon and tau flavor, as previously thought. Scientists refer to this as “nonmaximal mixing,” and NOvA’s preliminary result is the first hint that this may be the case for the third mass state.

“Neutrinos are always surprising us. This result is a fresh look into one of the major unknowns in neutrino physics,” said Mark Messier of Indiana University, co-spokesperson of the NOvA experiment.

The NOvA experiment, headquartered at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has been collecting data on neutrinos since February 2014. NOvA uses the world’s most powerful beam of muon neutrinos, generated at Fermilab, which travels through the Earth 500 miles to a building-size detector in northern Minnesota. NOvA was designed to study neutrino oscillations, the phenomenon by which these particles “flip” flavors while in transit.

NOvA has been using the oscillations of neutrinos to learn more about their basic properties for two years. The NOvA detector is sensitive to both muon and electron neutrinos and can analyze the number of muon neutrinos that remain after traveling through the Earth and the number of electron neutrinos that appear during the journey.

The data also show that the third mass state might have more muon flavor than tau flavor, or vice versa. The NOvA experiment hasn’t yet collected enough data to claim a discovery of nonmaximal mixing, but if this effect persists, scientists expect to have enough data to definitively explore this mystery in the coming years.

“NOvA is just getting started,” said Gregory Pawloski of the University of Minnesota, one of the NOvA scientists who worked on this result. “The data sample reported today is just one-sixth of the total planned, and it will be exciting to see if this intriguing hint develops into a discovery.”

NOvA will take data with neutrinos and antineutrinos over the next several years. With both detectors running smoothly and Fermilab’s neutrino beam at full strength, the NOvA experiment is well positioned to illuminate many of the remaining neutrino mysteries.

The NOvA experiment is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the National Science Foundation and other institutions worldwide.

For more information on NOvA, visit their website. To read a public presentation on this result, please visit this link.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at http://www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter @Fermilab. 

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov. 

Media contact:

• Andre Salles, Fermilab Office of Communication, media@fnal.gov, 630-840-3351

Science contacts:

• Mark Messier, Indiana University, NOvA co-spokesperson, messier@indiana.edu, 812-855-0236
• Peter Shanahan, Fermilab, NOvA co-spokesperson, shanahan@fnal.gov, 630-840-8378