User:MRuss
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Biography
Hey, my name is Megan Russ and my friends call me Megan Russ. I am a senior at Smithtown HS East and I like it that way. My favorite subject is physics (what else is there?), and I'm excited to be in AP Physics C next year! I'm in a few extracurriculars at my school like math team, habitat for humanity, radio, and stage crew. I got involved with MARIACHI through my physics teacher D-Wint after I was involved in the Particle Physics Master Class at my school. This summer, I will be working with Dr. Takai and several other students on a project having to do with cosmic rays at Brookhaven National Lab. Peace out!
Blog!
July 7th, 2008
First day of Summer 2008 Workshop! We started the Comic "Cosmic Ray" Book about Cosmic Chris, Cosmic Caitie, and their trusty Cosmic dog Cosmo. I also did a small workshop on using radar to locate cosmic rays and meteors. Fun stuff!
July 8th, 2008
Day 2!! We started out with a lesson in excel from Rich Gearns, which was helpful to a lot of people, including myself. We then moved into our station groups from yesterday, and moved to the flux station. This was really cool, partly because it was more hands on than yesterday's radar station. We looked at counting the cosmic rays in a stack of scintillators by changing the area of the center scintillator. Since we couldn't open the gun case, we changed the area by sliding the scintillator out of the stack by small increments. There's more about the flux experiment down in the "flux" section. Our other stations of today included measuring muon speed, working with the octogon, and clock synchronization. I really loved working with the octogon and the muon speed because they were hands on. Clock synchronization was really interesting, and I didn't realize that I took the time on my computer for granted. Thanks clock synchronization!
July 10th, 2008
Day 4! Sorry about missing yesterday guys. I was busy with the radar group. It was pretty awesome. We analyzed data from radar and looked for different peaks that may have been caused by cosmic rays, meteors or airplanes. Hopefully the first two. Today it looks like we are going to do something similar. I'm getting pretty tired. Getting up at 5:30 when you're not going to school can do that.
July 11th, 2008
Last and final day of the 2008 workshop. I have to say, it was pretty epic. Today I came in a devastating 7 minutes late (even though I was here before most people, but thats not the point...) and Charlie said to me, time to submit our designs! I TOTALLY forgot about the t-shirt design contest, and threw something together in 15 minutes. It turned out pretty cool really. But then the radar group took the antenna up to the lawn and tested the antennae we made yesterday. It was really awesome watching something we made be put into action...and work. When we came back in, Glen, Charlie and I threw together a quick presentation about what we had been doing for the past 3 days and it was epic!! Matt joined our group and helped out too. After our presentation we had the award ceremony, and my t-shirt won! Well, I tied for 2nd, and Dr. Takai said my shirt would be a better poster. Posters are better than t-shirts anyway- they never get dirty and you dont have to wash them. Until next summer workshop!
Fun Stuff!
Measuring Flux
An imprecise but effective way to measure the count of a scintillator is to alter the area the center scintillator in a stacking of 3. By sliding the middle detector out of the stack at different increments, the number of 3-fold coincidences will be altered. If the experiment is successful, the number of counts will decrease with each alteration. As cosmic rays go through the stack, they are counted by a light detector inside the scintillator. Each scintillator is connected to a computer that displays the cosmic ray count for each 60 second timing. The number of counts in the top and bottom scintillators remains mostly constant during each timing, and as the middle scintillator is slid out, the number of counts decreases, following the expectations of the experiment.
Muon Speed
Our second station of the day. We used 3 scintillators to try to measure the speed that the particles move at. 2 of the detectors were stacked and on shelves about 3 meters above the ground. A third was on an adjustable shelf that we altered in our experiment. We positioned the third detector at 103.5 inches below the 2 stacked scintillators, and using the oscillator, we measured the time (in nanoseconds) between the peaks of voltage, which indicate when a charged particle has passed through the scintillator. We did 16 trials at a distance of 103.5 inches, and found that the average time was 13.375 ns. We also did 16 trials where the distance between the scintillators was 0 inches. The average time in these trials was 8.125 ns. Using this information, we found that the speed of a muon was around 20 in/ns. Not only is this really fast, it defies the theory of relativity because it exceeds the speed of light (15 in/ns). The actual speed of a muon is around 12 in/ns, making our percent deviation 17.9%.
Clock Synchronization
Clock synchronization on the scintillators is extremely important because it allows us to look for coincidences in different detectors. Since cosmic rays come so often, the clock needs to be digital, and it needs to be measured not only in seconds, but nanoseconds in order to properly compare the timing of coincidences. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Network Time Protocol (NTP) are both effective ways of keeping time synchronized on computers storing the data from the scintillators, but GPS is more effective because it keeps time in nanoseconds.
