Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Joint Fall 2011 Meeting of the Texas Sections of the APS, AAPT, and Zone 13 of the SPS
Volume 56, Number 7
Thursday–Saturday, October 6–8, 2011; Commerce, Texas
Session L7: SPS/Undergraduate Abstracts II |
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Chair: Eric Hagedorn, University of Texas at El Paso Room: Science Building 123 |
Saturday, October 8, 2011 9:25AM - 9:37AM |
L7.00001: Angelo State Society of Physics Students Road Tour 2011 Stephen Parker, Toni Sauncy For the past seven years at the end of each spring semester, the ASU Society of Physics Students has journied throughout Texas for a week long outreach to various K-12 schools. During the week long outreach effort, a variety of physics demonstrations were presented to over 1300 students, teachers and school administrators. The goal of this public engagement activity is to both encourage younger students to consider following STEM related career paths and to spark an overall interest in science. Demonstrations focused on several aspects of physics. For the 2011 Road Tour, we paid special homage to the 100th anniversary of Ernest Rutherford's postulation of his model of the atom by explaining his results and their implications in 1911. In addition to adding several new demonstrations, the tradition of having a custom laser light show for each school was continued. As always, the fan favorite ``Nitrogen Bomb'' and a new nitrogen thunder cloud were added to our grand finales. The team, consisting of two faculty advisors and eleven students, was able to leave lasting impressions in a new and exciting way across central Texas. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 8, 2011 9:37AM - 9:49AM |
L7.00002: Using Selection Criteria to Optimize Analysis in High Energy Physics Christopher Davis, David Toback, Joel Walker, Daniel Cruz, Jacob Hill In Experimental High Energy Physics, searches for new particle typically involve rejecting events that pass certain selection criteria. We have studied new methods for improving the sensitivity of our searches in a general way. In particular, the assumption that two requirements are always better than one turns out to not always be true, but can be if optimized properly. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 8, 2011 9:49AM - 10:01AM |
L7.00003: The radiation tolerance of particular optical fibers at low temperatures Joshua Abramovitch This research project seeks to characterize a number of optical fibers in an irradiated, low-temperature environment, so that they may be used in the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC's) high luminosity upgrade at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). In the LHC experiments such as ATLAS and CMS, silicon pixel detectors are used to precisely measure the trajectories of charged particles. These detectors operate in a radioactive environment with ambient temperatures of -20 to -30 degrees Celsius, hence the requirement of radiation tolerance at low temperatures. A number of new fibers have been selected for their decreased bend sensitivity and improved bandwidth. Since, the LHC luminosity upgrade's requirements are very stringent, the vendor's specification data will be replaced with the results of this project. An optical test bench was needed to characterize the optical fibers in ionizing radiation from a Co-60 gamma source at Brookhaven National Laboratory in February 2011. Such a multi-channel optical measurement setup is not commercially available, and was as such designed in-house. Multiple 850nm VCSEL laser were used as sources, and TI OPT101 chips were used as detectors. This research contributes to the optical link R{\&}D project with Fermi National Laboratory, Oxford University, and CERN, and my work's progress is integrated into the project flow of this international collaborative group. [Preview Abstract] |
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