Beginning Concepts

• How do you measure what you cannot see?
• Analyzing Histograms

After understanding the beginning concepts, students can be introduced to activities in either

• Particle Decay or
• Momentum Conservation

in the MINERvA experiment.

Advanced Understanding

• The MINERvA Experiment in Depth

Note that many but not all links below go to the Teacher's Guide.

Measuring what you cannot see

Essential Questions

• How is the MINERvA project being used to detect subatomic particles?
• What are neutrinos and why are they especially difficult to observe?
• What is the characteristic signature of decay and momentum events in the MINERvA detector?

Activities and Resources

• Particle Events in 60 seconds
• A short article from Symmetry Magazine (pdf)
• Neutrinos in 60 seconds
• A short article from Symmetry Magazine (pdf)
• A quick assessment for teachers to use to gauge the content that students already have in the topic of modern physics.
  • Particle Pre-Assessment for Students (Link into Teacher's Guide)
• Description of MINERvA
• What is MINERvA? (Google Slides)    (Powerpoint file)
• MINERvA's web page at Fermilab
• Activity: build a 3D Model of the MINERvA Detector
• Activity: Build a 3D Model of the MINERvA Detector (Link into Google Doc teacher's guide)
• How do we make neutrinos and where do they go?
• Presentation: Neutrino Birth And Death  (Powerpoint file)
• See what the MINERvA detector is doing right now
  • Unfiltered, stream of consciousness events from MINERvA

    (Note that if you see a detector with no activity, it is possible that the neutrino beam is not operating at Fermilab right now. There are sometimes shutdowns, especially over the summer.

  • Contact us to arrange a video chat with a MINERvA physicist from our control room.

Histograms

Essential Questions

• What is a histogram ?
• What are disadvantages of working with small data sets?

Activities and Resources

• A lesson plan, including labs, for introducing histograms outside of a particle physics context
  • Introducing Histograms (Link into Teacher's Guide)   (Word file)

The MINERvA Experiment In Depth

Essential Questions

• Sometimes data is messy, ambiguous or complex. How do scientists deal with different interpretations of the same data?
• Aside from elastic collisions and muon decay, what other kinds of events are observed in the MINERvA data?

Activities and Resources

• Neutrinos in the big picture, from the Big Bang to the Standard ModelKevin McFarland's Neutrino Talk for Students (ppt)
  • Kevin McFarland: Neutrinos: No Charge, No Mass? No Problem (Google Slides)  (Powerpoint)
• A history of neutrinos and introduction to neutrino physics
  • "Norton Nabs a Nu" (Google Slides), a presentation by Paul Nienaber
• Explore the zoo of neutrino interactions seen in MINERvA so far
• Types of Events in MINERvA (Google Slides)  (Powerpoint)
• Exploration MINERvA's events with Arachne
• Arachne scavenger hunt (Link into Google Doc teacher's guide)
• Do you have an idea for analyzing MINERvA's data?
  • If you do find something interesting in our data, we may be interested in collaborating with you to understand what you have found! Contact us to discuss your idea for an analysis.
    • Please note: we do ask that you not independently publish or disseminate results based on MINERvA's data without first discussing it with the collaboration. We have invested much in building this detector, and ask you for this courtesy in exchange for our willingness to share our data with you. Thank you for understanding.