A post for auld lang syne

December 24, 2010 | 10:00 am

This is the only kind of particle collision we're going to be thinking about. Photo by Jeremy Wilburn.

The time for winter break has come
so we hope that you won’t mind
a terrible song as a parting gift
to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Should auld blog posts be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld blog posts be forgot
and auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a look back on 2010,
for auld lang syne.

On the Higgs, the Tevatron placed
new limits from GeV/c² 158 to 175;
And maybe multiple Higgses have been
hiding from us since auld lang syne.

The LHC ran at 7 TeV,
and collided lead ions fine;
It quickly rediscovered the Standard Model,
we’ve studied since auld lang syne.

Who could forget Craig Hogan’s holometer,
or the poetry it inspired?
Or physics tweets, earthquakes and neutrinos,
passing through since auld lang syne.

Of course there were some silly posts
from Lady Gaga to the Hitchhiker’s Guide;
CERN singers or the Fermilab rap:
You can watch them for auld lang syne.

And surely we’ll write more posts next year
(We assure you that they won’t rhyme.)
But while we’re gone, you can always look back
for auld lang syne.

Kathryn Grim

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Holidays on ice: IceCube Neutrino Observatory complete

December 22, 2010 | 11:23 am

A simulated neutrino track. Image courtesy of Berkeley Lab.

On Saturday, Dec. 18, scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory lowered their last strand of particle detectors into the ice beneath them. The garland of 86 basketball-sized optical sensors completed a frozen array of 5,160 detectors that will search for neutrinos 1.5 km beneath the surface at the South Pole.

“With the completion of IceCube, the 1970s dream of building a kilometer-scale neutrino detector has finally become a reality,” said Francis Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the IceCube collaboration’s principal investigator.

Each day trillions of neutrinos pass through the cubic kilometer the array covers. They come from the sun, from cosmic rays interacting with Earth’s atmosphere, and from more distant sources such as exploding stars. As neutrinos rarely interact with matter, the detectors will catch signals of just a few hundred of them per day.

When neutrinos collide with the nuclei of oxygen atoms in the ice, they turn into muons and set loose a shower of other particles. These particles move faster than light can travel through ice, so they send out a shock wave of blue Cherenkov radiation, which photodetectors in the IceCube array can see.

The image to the right represents what a high-energy neutrino would look like moving upward through the detectors. The circles are individual detectors, and their size represents the amount of light they would detect from Cherenkov radiation. The colors move from warmer to cooler depending on when each detector would receive a signal.

Read the press releases from NSF and Berkeley Lab.

Kathryn Grim

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ALICE event display – decoded!

December 21, 2010 | 10:00 am

Diagram of the ALICE detector

Most of the time, the Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons, particles so tiny they fit inside of atoms. But for about a month each year the LHC runs, the scientists load the machine with something a bit heartier: lead ions.

Heavy-ion season is the ALICE detector’s time to shine. Of the four detectors at the LHC, only ALICE was designed specifically to study these types of collisions. This post breaks down different components of the ALICE detector and explains how scientists use them to study matter as it formed after the big bang.

Heavy-ion collisions in the LHC can create quark-gluon plasma, a phase of matter scientists think only occurred in nature during the first millionths of a second of the universe’s birth. In this state, protons and neutrons melt into a hot soup of their constituent pieces, quarks and gluons. Earlier this year, physicists announced definitive evidence for having created QGP at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy
Ion Collider. In November, scientists at the LHC observed characteristics attributed to the quark-gluon plasma as well.

Members of the ALICE collaboration want to study the quark-gluon plasma to learn more about the first few moments that shaped our universe. The many components of the ALICE detector give them the information they need.

1: Silicon tracker
The silicon tracker is a cylinder made up of six layers of silicon detectors surrounding the beam pipe, where particles speed into one another and collide. The silicon tracker takes high-precision measurements of the properties and flight path of particles leaving collisions in the beam pipe.

Scientists need the highest precision measurements closest to the collision point to ensure that the particles they are tracking, there and elsewhere in the detector, actually come from a collision. Particles within the beam can scatter or decay on their own, providing distracting background particles the scientists do not want to confuse with the particles they’re trying to study.

ALICE event display

2: Time projection chamber
Surrounding the silicon tracker is the time projection chamber, or TPC. It has a radius of 2.5 meters. The TPC is a container full of gas that allows scientists to measure the momenta and masses of charged particles. When a charged particle flies through the gas in the TPC, it pulls electrons from the gas molecules. A high-voltage electric field running through the center of the TPC causes those electrons to drift to the ends of the chamber, the endcaps.

The detector records where and when the electrons hit sensors on the endcaps. It’s like taking a series of photos of a finish line of a race from directly above. If you flip through the photos you took, you can see the order in which the runners arrived, how far apart they were and where they crossed the finish line. Scientists take information from the detector to find out how the electrons ran their race to the endcap. Using this information, they can figure out the path the particle that knocked them loose followed and how fast it was moving.

Scientists can also use the detector to determine the momentum of a particle. The entire chamber is in a magnetic field, so charged particles curve as they move through it. Positively charged particles curve in one direction and negatively charged particles curve in the opposite direction. Scientists can determine the momentum of a particle based on how much it curves. The field bends the path of slower particles more than it does faster ones.

Not pictured: Time-of-flight barrel
Surrounding the TPC is the time-of-flight barrel, not pictured here. The time-of-flight barrel is important, as it allows scientists to identify passing particles.

Scientists recognize a particle by its mass. The momentum of a particle is equal to its mass multiplied by its velocity. Since scientists already know the momentum of a particle based on the curvature of its path through the magnetic field in the TPC, all they need to know to calculate the mass is its velocity. That’s where the time-of-flight barrel comes in.

The time-of-flight barrel measures the time that each signal arrives, which lets the scientists know how long the particle took to travel through the TPC. The distance the particle traveled through the TPC divided by that time equals the velocity of the particle. Scientists calculate the mass of a particle by dividing its momentum by its velocity.

ALICE event display at an angle

3: Electromagnetic calorimeter
The electromagnetic calorimeter, or EMCal, has the task of measuring neutral particles, such as photons or electrons. It earned its name because photons and electrons interact through the electromagnetic force.

The image here represents the data the ALICE detector collected from a collision of two lead ions. You can see the tracks left in the TPC by about 3,000 charged particles. Another about 1,500 neutral particles passed through the gas chamber unnoticed, as they did not ionize the gas inside it. The calorimeter measures the energy of those neutral particles by absorbing them.

The red bars pictured here represent particles that deposited a particularly large amount of energy. The height of the bar represents its energy. The smaller purple bars represent lower energy particles, most likely charged particles, which will most likely be considered background and no longer be measured once the tolerance of the detector is reset.

4: Transition radiation detector
This detector measures transition radiation, emitted when a particle traveling nearly the speed of light traverses a material. The transition radiation detector allows scientists to identify high-velocity particles. As you read above, the momentum of a particle is equal to its mass multiplied by its velocity. If two particles of similar mass both are moving at very high velocities, they will have similar momenta and be difficult to tell apart using only the TPC.

5: Photon spectrometer
The photon spectrometer, or PhoS, detects photons, which are neutral particles. Some particles that emerge from collisions break down into electron – positron pairs.

In this image, the sensitivity of the photon spectrometer was set lower than that of the calorimeter, so you don’t see as many background signals. The blue bars represent neutral particles that deposited energy.

ALICE event display with muon detector

6: Muon detector
Muons are the heavy cousins of electrons. Scientists want to identify particles that decay into muons, such as beauty and charm quarks. The last piece of the particle detector is the muon detector, pictured here in green.

The muon detector is made up of steel plates and tracking chambers. The steel absorbs most particles, but muons rarely interact with matter. So any charged particles hardy enough to make it through the entire detector and steel plates are likely to be muons, shown here as blue and green lines.

Other posts in this series include: CMS event display — decoded!, ATLAS event display — decoded! and LHC Page 1 — decoded!

Kathryn Grim

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Global Particle Physics Photowalk calendar available for download

December 17, 2010 | 12:48 pm

This year, five laboratories in four countries invited more than 200 photographers to tour their grounds and translate the work of science into works of art. A calendar featuring the 15 winning images from the Global Particle Physics Photowalk is now available for free download.

Download the calendar and printing instructions here. If you would like to have the calendar printed professionally, check with businesses that print photographs.

See the winning photos from DESY, Fermilab, SLAC, TRIUMF and KEK at InterActions.org or read more in symmetry breaking about the winning photographers.

Kathryn Grim

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Another year of searching for magnetic monopoles

December 15, 2010 | 11:00 am

Scientists prepare to launch ANITA, a balloon-borne radio telescope that scientists used to search for cosmic rays and magnetic monopoles. Image courtesy of University of Hawaii Manoa.

The Higgs boson may be the hot target for both the Tevatron and the LHC, but it’s far from the only particle that physicists would like to find. There are gravitons, tachyons and dark matter particles, which may or may not be linked to supersymmetric partner particles (and oh, by the way, physicists would like to find those, too).

And there are monopoles. Of all the empty cages in the particle zoo, none is so bereft of its inhabitants as the monopole exhibit. Monopoles are hypothetical particles that display an odd form of magnetism, having either a north pole or a south pole, but not both.

In a talk presented at the Dirac Centennial Symposium in early December of 2002, the prominent string theorist Joseph Polchinski described the existence of monopoles as “one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen.”

But not one experiment has irrefutably demonstrated that monopoles exist.

Indeed, this year’s reports seem to worsen the odds. This includes findings from the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, aka ANITA—a balloon-borne radio telescope that gathered data while floating in circles around the South Pole—and the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detection Array, aka AMANDA—another neutrino detector buried in the Antarctic ice. These two detectors searched for magnetic monopoles by detecting the Cherenkov radiation resulting from their passing—either directly or from showers of particles left behind by a monopole instigating decay in another cosmic particle. The technique worked when the instruments looked for neutrinos. ANITA even found particle showers induced by cosmic ray events, but no monopoles.

Monopoles first received theoretical support when the brilliant theoretical physicist Paul Dirac showed mathematically that one possible reason for the quantization of the electric charge (in other words, why electric charge only occurs in integer amounts) is the existence of a complementary magnetic particle with a quantized magnetic charge. This put monopoles on fairly firm footing as far as quantum electrodynamics was concerned. When magnetic monopoles began popping up in grand unification theories as a consequence of the dissociation of electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, they gained even more adherents among theorists.

Although scientists have an idea what they would like monopoles to do, they’re not sure how to describe them. This makes them more difficult to hunt. Predictions for the mass of a magnetic monopole range from 10⁵ to 10¹⁸ GeV. Predictions for monopole velocities range from a thousandth of the speed of light to three-quarters the speed of light or higher.

Probably the simplest way to find a monopole is to wait for one to pass through a superconducting ring. In such an experiment, an ordinary magnetic particle with two poles would induce a current in one direction as the first pole dropped through and then a second current in the opposite direction as the other pole dropped through, thus canceling the current out. But a magnetic monopole would induce only one current, which would not be canceled out. Indeed, this technique may have found a magnetic monopole—once—the so-called “Valentine’s Day Monopole,” on February 14, 1982. But since the detector never saw another one, it’s been written off as a tantalizing but statistically insignificant tease. So the search for monopoles continues through experiments like the Monopole and Exotics Detector, or MoEDAL experiment, at CERN.

Polchinski’s “safe bet” quote is a favorite of monopole enthusiasts. What doesn’t get quoted as often is his closing statement on the matter: “But we must continue to hope that we will be lucky, or unexpectedly clever, some day.”

– Lori Anne White

Symmetry Intern

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LHC completes first heavy-ion run

December 13, 2010 | 10:15 am

Direct observation of jet quenching

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in the CERN Bulletin on December 13, 2010, under the headline 2010 ion run: completed! For more information, see posts about heavy-ion collisions and what scientists can learn from them. You can also read more in symmetry breaking about first measurements from the heavy-ion run and new insight into the primordial universe.

After a very fast switchover from protons to lead ions, the LHC has achieved performances that allowed the machine to exceed both peak and integrated luminosity by a factor of three. Thanks to this, experiments have been able to produce high-profile results on ion physics almost immediately, confirming that the LHC was able to keep its promises for ions as well as for protons.

A seminar on 2 December was the opportunity for the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations to present their first results on ion physics in front of a packed auditorium. These results are important and are already having a major impact on the understanding of the physics processes that involve the basic constituents of matter at high energies.

In the ion-ion collisions, the temperature is so high that partons (quarks and gluons), which are usually constrained inside the nucleons, are deconfined to form a highly dense and hot soup known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP). This type of matter existed about 1 millionth of a second after the Big Bang. By studying it, scientists hope to understand the processes that led to the formation of nucleons, which in turn became the nuclei of atoms.

At the recent seminar, the LHC’s dedicated heavy-ion experiment, ALICE, confirmed that QGP behaves like an ideal liquid, a phenomenon earlier observed at the US Brookhaven Laboratory’s RHIC facility. This question was indeed one of the main points of this first phase of data analysis, which also included the analysis of secondary particles produced in the lead-lead collisions. ALICE’s results already rule out many of the existing theoretical models describing the physics of heavy-ions.

Jet quenching in the CMS detector

ATLAS presented the first direct observation of jet quenching, a phenomenon indirectly seen at RHIC a few years ago. The experiment has shown an imbalance in the energy distribution of two back-to-back jets (see ATLAS picture) in so-called central collisions. Centrality is a parameter indicating how big is the overlap of the two ions is when they collide; it is minimal when they hit only in the corner and it’s maximum when they overlap completely. ATLAS’s result is the first direct demonstration that when one of the two jets of particles goes through denser regions of QGP, its total energy is distributed in the medium and the jet appears to be almost totally absorbed. The observation of this imbalance and the study of the distribution of the energy are powerful means to study the properties of QGP. Confirmation of the direct observation of jet quenching came from the CMS experiment, which also reported the first observation of the production of Z bosons in heavy ion collisions.

In about one month of running with ions, the LHC experiments also collected evidence of the production of particles such as J/Psi and Upsilon, which again provide excellent tools to study the properties of deconfined matter. In future, they will be important in understanding the detailed behaviour of QGP.

Studies of heavy-ion physics have just started at the LHC and a lot of new results are expected from the data analysis that will be done in the coming weeks and months. So far, all the detectors have performed remarkably well, with data taking efficiency as high as 95%. This has translated into several publications that are just the beginning of the LHC’s heavy-ion adventure.

– CERN Bulletin

Guest author

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Diamond experience: A science-fiction author visits the Diamond Light Source

December 9, 2010 | 8:20 am

An aerial view of the Diamond Light Source. Image courtesy of Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.

Editor’s note: This submission came to symmetry breaking from John Gilbey, a science and science-fiction writer featured in the April 2010 issue of symmetry magazine. Here he describes his experience visiting the Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility. Gilbey often takes his inspiration for his fiction from trips to real-life laboratories, so be on the look-out for a familiar setting in one of his next tales.

When the Science Online London 2010 conference offered me the chance to tour the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, England, my inner geek pushed me to sign up straight away.

Diamond is a new synchrotron facility built in the heart of rural England providing superb purpose-built facilities for a wide range of experimental work. The facility opened in 2007 and is being built in three phases. Crews built the first seven beamlines during the first phase, which the laboratory completed in 1997 on a budget of £263 million. Construction has now reached the second phase, during which the laboratory will use £120 million to build 15 additional beamlines by 2012.

At six o’clock on a beautiful September evening, a coach collected our varied group – science bloggers, writers, communicators and just plain old enthusiasts – from Euston Station in London. As we trundled westward through the rush hour traffic, it was clear that we were going to take a while to get there – and dusk was already falling when we spotted the massive, metal-clad doughnut of Diamond on the horizon.

Our host, Dr. Sara Fletcher, Diamond’s web and information manager, was clearly glad to see us arrive safely – and after a quick overview of the project she handed us over to her team of cheerful researcher volunteers for a tour of the facility.

Split into teams of six, we moved down the glazed high-level walkway that links the admin building to the source itself. We immediately had some excellent news – Diamond was in a period of down-time, so we were able to get a much closer view of the technology than would otherwise be the case.

After a safety briefing and a polite but firm request not to touch anything, we entered the Diamond Light Source itself. From the outside, the building looks impressive – from inside it is dramatically more so. The walls and ceiling curve away in such a gentle fashion that the overall scale of the building is dramatically reinforced.

Everything about the facility is on a grand scale: The storage ring, which gives the building its characteristic shape, is 581 metres in circumference. The floor area is 45,000 square metres – the size of 8 St. Paul’s cathedrals. The building contains 35,000 cubic metres of concrete and over 2,000 tons of steel – almost unimaginable quantities.

Unlike some science facilities I have visited, Diamond has a sense of one-ness – an integration of innumerable requirements in a single direction: It has clearly been designed to allow, and support, rapidly changing requirements and technologies. That these evolving needs can be accommodated within such a large scale managed facility is a credit to the project planners and managers.

The UK government reinforced its commitment to the project in the October 2010 Public Spending Review, during which it dedicated funding to the third phase of the project. In the current economic climate, and amongst significant cuts to public sector spending in the UK, this is a massive endorsement of Diamond’s importance. By 2017, Diamond will have a total of 32 beamlines – which will no doubt add significantly to the more than 1,000 publications already produced by the project.

Most impressive of all, however, are the people. Despite us being so late, our guides gave us an intimate, wildly enthusiastic look at an exceptional research facility – and gave us a glimpse of the kind of buzz that working in this environment generates.

– John Gilbey

Inside the Diamond Light Source. Photo courtesy of John Gilbey.

Guest author

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The next generation of accelerator

December 7, 2010 | 8:20 am

The Cockcroft-Walton pre-injectors. Image courtesy of Michael Monaxios.

This story first appeared in Fermilab Today on November 29, 2010.

Fermilab’s iconic Cockcroft-Waltons are on their last mission. In 2012, the elephantine generators will join the cyclotron magnet in the annals of accelerator history. This will make room for a top-of-the-line system only a few yards in length.

The new pre-injector, which will include a radio frequency quadrupole, or RFQ, is scheduled to be installed during the shutdown in 2012. Accelerator Division’s Bill Pellico expects the RFQs to be more reliable than the Cockcroft-Waltons and require less monitoring.

“On the operators’ side, it means fewer headaches and more uptime. On the physicists’ side, it means higher quality beam and lower losses,” Pellico said.

In the current system, after the initial beam is accelerated by a Cockcroft-Walton, it enters a device called a Drift Tube Linac (DTL) which converts it into little packets, or bunches, that are accelerated down the Linac. Between the Cockcroft-Walton and the DTL, much of the beam is lost. The RFQ, however, can both create bunches and accelerate them with increased efficiency. This could potentially increase luminosity.

In the 1980s, Fermilab joined with Brookhaven National Laboratory to design and order RFQs, but Fermilab decided not to proceed while Brookhaven went ahead.

“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” said Cheng-Yang Tan, who is leading the design effort on the project. “We are trying to copy as much as we can from Brookhaven, while using newer technology.”

Nonetheless, after the RFQ system arrives from Germany in early 2011, a team headed by Pellico, Tan and Dan Bollinger will spend the next six months calibrating and testing it on a dummy system they are constructing for this purpose. They want no surprises when experiments start back up.

“Since there are two Cockcroft-Waltons, we have a backup, but we only have one RFQ,” Pellico said. “We have to be sure it is more reliable:None of the downstream experiments will get beam if we have to work on the RFQ during normal operations.”

No word has arrived yet on where the Cockcroft-Waltons will end up, although they’ll almost certainly be preserved as a visitor attraction.

“I’d kind of like to use one as an office,” Pellico said.

Fermilab will host a Proton Source Workshop on Dec. 7 and 8 to discuss the RFQ system and other upgrades.

– Sara Reardon

Symmetry Intern

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A new record for ATLAS

December 6, 2010 | 8:30 am

A few of the ATLAS musicians appearing in the first CD, which features blues, rock and heavy metal.

The ATLAS experiment at CERN has a new record – but this time note for proton collisions recorded or numbers of exotic particles produced. Instead, today marks the debut of the collaboration’s first music album, featuring several dozen physicists, engineers and technicians playing everything from heavy metal to classical piano.

Resonance: Music from the ATLAS experiment goes on sale today and can be purchased via iTunes. All proceeds will benefit the Happy Children’s Home, a charity founded by former CERN employee Mette Stuwe.

The album has been in the works for more than two years, with 26 ATLAS scientist-musicians, along with 42 of their bandmates, collaborators and fellow musicians, recording the thirty-six tracks in their spare time. The idea for the album was born in October 2008 during a party celebrating the successful completion of the massive ATLAS detector, where the musical entertainment included several bands that counted ATLAS collaborators as members.

Some of the ATLAS collaboration's classical musicians, featured on the second CD.

The final two-CD set includes some tracks by the bands that played in that 2008 celebration but isn’t limited to rock. In a reflection of the diversity of the collaboration’s 3,000 members, the album includes a range of musical styles, from blues and jazz to classical and celtic harp.

But while the CD might show another side of particle physicists, they by no means ignore the subject they spend their days (and often nights) devoted to.  Several tracks feature original songs with physics themes, including The ATLAS Boogie and “Points of Order”, a lament about the LHC’s multitude of meetings.

Rounding out the album’s eclectic offerings is a DVD that features the famous LHC rap, a time-lapse video of the ATLAS detector’s construction, a “making of Resonance” video and an interview with the founders of the Happy Children’s Home.

More information, clips and video available at the Resonance website.

Katie Yurkewicz

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Students prepare to launch particle detector into space

December 3, 2010 | 10:40 am

Rachel O'Leary, Rachel Powell and Adam Sandey, three of the original student members of the LUCID project. Image courtesy of the Langton Star Centre.

High school physics teacher Becky Parker and her students thought they would soon be the first to send a new type of particle-detecting microchip into outer space.

In 2012 the TechDemoSat-1 satellite will blast into orbit carrying a cosmic-ray detector that the students designed and adorned with their school mascot, a Langton lion.

But NASA will narrowly beat the students to the task. The space agency plans to fly detectors made up of the same microchips to the International Space Station before the end of 2011 to help monitor astronauts’ exposure to cosmic rays and other space radiation in real time.

This does not faze Parker, who teaches at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury, England. Rather, it serves to her as proof that the extracurricular science project she orchestrates gives her students a taste of real, cutting-edge physics.

“It’s not a school experiment; it’s proper high technology,” Parker said. “It makes me sort of lose my breath sometimes that we’re sending up an experiment that probably has as much significance as many other experiments being sent up into space.”

It started with a field trip and a contest, as Parker noted in the June 2010 issue of symmetry magazine. Parker regularly takes groups of students to the CERN laboratory on the border of France and Switzerland. During a trip in 2007, tour guides took them to the laboratory of a British scientist, Michael Campbell. Campbell showed the students microchips he and his collaboration designed to detect particles in collisions in the Large Hadron Collider. The advanced, radiation-hard technology could detect the energy and direction of motion of individual particles.

Parker remembered the chips when, soon after the visit, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. held a competition to choose a student experiment to send into orbit on one of its satellites. She received permission for her students to use the technology in designing a cosmic-ray detector to go into space.

Diagram of the LUCID detector. Image courtesy of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.

To support the Langton Ultimate Cosmic-ray Intensity Detector – LUCID – project, more than 50 students have formed a miniature laboratory, complete with computer programmers and a publicity team. When students graduate, they hand their responsibilities down to the lower grades. Both boys and girls participate; Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys kept its historical name when the institution began admitting both genders.

Student William Matcham, 18, who has been working on LUCID since 2007, said he appreciates the independence the project offers the students.

“Most times in the classroom, we’re told what to do and what the result’s going to be,” he said. “This is the opposite.”

Before the detector heads to the great beyond, the students need to develop software that will control how often and for how long an electronic “gate” that activates the detector will open to expose its 65,000 pixels to cosmic radiation. When the detector is moving through an area with little radiation, the gate can stay open longer to gradually collect signals from cosmic rays passing through it. But when it is in an area with a high concentration of particles, such as the South Atlantic Anomaly, it needs to spend more time shut to avoid overloading the available bandwidth.

The students are developing an algorithm to make the detector constantly readjust the timing of the gate in response to its readings, said Professor Larry Pinsky, chair of physics at the University of Houston, who has been advising the students. The detector will beam cosmic-ray data from the satellite back to the students, who will distribute it to colleagues from at least 10 other schools in the Kent area and other schools around Europe.

“It’s like playing at being NASA or the European Space Agency, but they’re not really playing,” Pinsky said. “They’re doing the real thing.”

Since the project began, more Langton students have gone on to enroll in physics and engineering classes at university and, Parker hopes, will continue their pursuit of real-world science into the future.

Kathryn Grim

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