Summer Workshop 2023
June 14-16, 2023
The group’s QuarkNet outreach program, now in its 24th year, continues to build on our long-term collaboration with high schools around Chicago. The project involves teachers and
students in science by providing laboratory experiences including constructing, maintaining, and operating ten cosmic ray detectors in their schools, in coordination with physics professors and
graduate students. Adams visited a subset of high schools during the academic year to assist with experiments designed by students.
The group’s main focus during the last few years has been an effort to measure the muon shadow cast by the moon, something not yet accomplished on the Earth’s surface. Four teachers, ten students, and mentor Adams designed and built muon telescopes, and have been collecting data at four sites with six detectors for over a year. They have held eight half-day workshops on the weekends during the academic year to develop the analysis. The UIC summer workshop (June 14-16, 2023) was held at a local high school during which initial results were produced and poster designs were drafted. Analysis was completed during the Fall 2023; upper limits for the moon shadow search were presented by students at the AAPT Winter Conference, New Orleans, January 6-9, 2024.
The group also carried out another cosmic ray measurement during the 2024 total solar eclipse April 8th in the path of totality in Indiana (300 miles from Chicago). Based on knowledge gained from the moon shadow experiment, the team redesigned the technique for the eclipse to target higher energy cosmic rays. An array of horizontally separated scintillation counters (composed of six cosmic ray detectors from New Trier, Downers Grove South, Geneva, and Fermilab) were located in a barn in Indiana in the path of totality. During a trip two weeks before the eclipse, the detectors were configured by a team of four students, their parents, Unterman, and Adams. An even larger set of students (10) and parents participated during eclipse day, experiencing the eclipse and collecting muon data during the entire eclipse period.
Unterman has obtained funding from his school to build two radio telescopes. Our QuarkNet group hopes to correlate cosmic ray air shower signals from the radio horns and existing scintillation counters during the next academic year.