SCIPP

Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics

Quarknet-SCIPP Internship 2007

Welcome to the 2007 Internship at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics! Under a program funded by Quarknet, a section of Fermilab, students work at the University of California, Santa Cruz on projects relating to the spread of muons in the atmosphere and their lifetimes.

During the Summer of 2007, Six High School interns worked at SCIPP on:

Designing and Building a Balloon Deployable Detector
Electronics
Building Scintillator Panels
Testing Scintillator Panels
Muon Lifetime Experiments

What is a muon?
The muon is an elementary particle (lepton) with negative electric charge and a spin of 1/2. It has a mean lifetime of 2.2 microseconds. The lepton family consists of the electron, the tau, the muon, and the neutrinos. The muon has an antimatter partner of positive charge but same mass and spin: the antimuon, which is also called a positive muon. Muons are denoted by the greek letter Mu (µ), while their antimatter counterparts are µ+.

Xilinx FPGA Programming
Website Design

In addition, students and teachers attended lectures and colloquiums on exciting areas within particle physics and quantum mechanics.

The Interns

The interns began their quest with the documents in the References section, and proceeded to plan, execute, and record experiments related to muon counts and lifetimes.