Summer Workshop 2018
June 25, 2018 - June 29, 2018
The UIC summer workshop (June 25-29, 2018) was attended by three teachers and seven students. It was hosted at Naperville Central High School. Research groups with participants mixed from five high schools measured muon absorption as a function of overburdern by placing detectors on three separate floors. A careful normalization process was required because the effect is small. Corrections due to atmospheric pressure changes and local variations in overburden were taken into account. Participants discovered that walls created a large background and they designed additional measurements to correct for that background, including obtaining data outside.
Participants also used their data set to search for correlated muons from large air showers among the four detectors at Naperville Central plus two detectors at Fermilab.
The Fermilab neutrino campus was toured midweek. Careful attention was paid to the MINOS access shaft and a high school group was formed to prepare a proposal to Fermilab to measure the cosmic ray flux in neutrino tunnel, 103 m underground, as a function of distance from the access shaft.