Volume 282 -
38th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP2016) -
Education and Outreach
Full text:
pdf
Pre-published on:
February 06, 2017
Published on:
April 19, 2017
Abstract
The Escaramujo Project was a series of eight
hands-on laboratory courses on High Energy Physics and Astroparticle
Instrumentation, in Latinamerican Institutions. The Physicist Federico
Izraelevitch traveled on a van with his wife and dogs from Chicago to
Buenos Aires teaching the courses. The sessions took place at
Institutions in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru
and Bolivia at an advanced undergraduate and graduate level. During
these workshops, each group built a modern cosmic ray detector based on
plastic scintillator and silicon photomultipliers, designed specifically
for this project. After the courses, a functional detector remained at
each institution to be used by the faculty to facilitate the training of
future students and to support and enable local research activities.
The five-days workshops covered topics such as elementary particle and
cosmic ray Physics, radiation detection and instrumentation, low-level
light sensing with solid state devices, front-end analog electronics and
object-oriented data analysis (C++ and ROOT). Throughout this
initiative, about a hundred of talented and highly motivated young
students were reached. With the detector as a common thread, they were
able to understand the designing principles and the underlying Physics
involved in it, build the device, start it up, characterize it, take
data and analyze it, mimicking the stages of a real elementary particle
Physics experiment. Besides the aims to awaken vocations in science,
technology and engineering, The Escaramujo Project was an effort to
strengthen the integration of Latinamerican academic institutions into
the international scientific community.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.282.0342
https://pos.sissa.it/282/342
