Physics Outreach

BobPanoffatNDPhysics, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

Bob Panoff of Shodor and the National Computational Science Institute visited ND last week. He gave talks to the Computer Science and Physics departments, and discussed ways that NDeRC might collaborate with NCSI in presenting workshops for K-12 teachers to introduce them to computational science and modeling. We’ve worked with Bob for the past five years at Supercomputing Education Programs and NCSI summer workshops, and we’re excited to have him involved with his alma mater (ND ’77.)

“This is a test of dial2do a new phone service where you can call and have your message transcribe email to you texted to you or in this case you send directly to your blog.”

Not bad for a first try. Dial2Do is a free service which does much of what jott.com used to do for free, and still does for way-not free.

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downsized_0212091507.jpg, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

This closeup of a Nanosurf STM. Notice the tip up against the gold surface.

This image was taken of a Nanosurf STM, used by a high school researcher from Saint Joseph’s High School. Having spent no small amount of time learning to use the instrument, this student is searching for large-scale deformities in octane thiol (8-SH) monolayers on a gold surface (on a scale, say, of 50 nanometers, some 100 times larger than the internuclear distance for carbon atoms). Samples are exposed to hexane for various amounts of time, and the impacts of that exposure on the 8-SH surface. NDeRC Fellow Annette Raigoza shared some of her experience working with this project here and surrounding posts.

VoiceThread is another technology for gathering user-generated content: this time, user comment on a variety of images arranged sequentially. Here I’ve imported some Forum II images from Flickr and added a few comments on some of them, which you can access by clicking on my profile image whenever it shows up to the left or right of the featured image. (I typed my comments from a PC without a mic or webcam, but I could have recorded audio–even by phone–or video.) Try your hand by adding your own comments to this Forum II VoiceThread!

I’ve been a Google Earth user almost since its inception. Another time, I’ll say more about how I’ve used it in a classroom setting. But it is worth posting, for anyone who will take the time to read, that Earth 5.0 is out, and is wonderfully upgraded. Click on the Earth 5.0-generated image below to watch a Jing screencast. (The video is a high-resolution file (153 MB)–if you have a slow connection, you might pass this one up. Even with a mid-sized pipe, let the file buffer for a while after you access it but before you play it.)

You know you want one of these. Add your own text, or import it from your last blog entry as I just did, at http://www.wordle.net/create Have fun!

VickiFrohne’sBfield, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

A detector can be a pretty simple thing: in this case, a white plate with iron filings sprinked across it amount to a detector of the magnetic field associated with the bar magnet placed under the plate. Participants at Science Alive! 2009 could explore this and related magnetic phenomena at a booth set up courtesy of Dr. Vicki Frohne of Holy Cross College.

This is another short clip of a cosmic ray detector on display at Science Alive!. It is interesting the see the same phenomena in so very different a medium: here, electons in scintillating material are excited by passing cosmic rays, and then fall back down to lower energy states, emitting photons. Those photons are drawn through a series of photomultiplying tubes in the kind of image intensifier used in night vision rifle scopes. As the cosmic rays travel through the scintillating target, they leave a trail of emitted photons in their wake, which once intensified we can see across the detector screen. Four of these events occur plainly within this 11 second video.

Lots of wonderful things happen at Science Alive!, the award-winning annual event held at the Saint Joseph County Public Library. A few highlights from the event are captured here.

In this video, cosmic rays leave vapor trails as they ionize ethanol in this supersaturated cloud chamber. For whatever reason, the basement of the SJCPL is especially active: the cloud chamber puts on a better show there than anywhere else we’ve seen, and that in spite of some degree of shielding of cosmic rays one would expect underneath a building of several stories. Any ideas as to why this might be the case?

2009-02-03_0922, originally uploaded by TomLoughran.

Sketched in black is a plot of the total energy absorbed in either the hadron or the electron calorimeter subdetector sections from the CMS Test Beam (2004 data). Underneath the faint black line, in red, is the energy absorbed by the electron calorimeter (Ecal) alone. The close overlap between these plots (from 4 runs of 10K events/run of electrons at a beam energy of 30 GeV–30 billion electron volts) indicates that total energy and Ecal energies were the same, and thus that Hcal energy is effectively zero. Thus, all the energy from the electrons was absorbed in the electron calorimeter–exactly what a calorimeter is meant to do: you can’t know the energy of a particle unless you completely stop it; its energy is related to how difficult it is to stop.)

This is data which high school students can access from the CMS detector, one of two general purpose detectors (along with Altas) at the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, awaiting start-up at CERN. Here’s a link to the kind of poster which students can create using this data. It won’t be long before data from the fully operational CMS detector is available to students in the same way.