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Jeremy Smith (left), a physics teacher at Hereford High School in Maryland, worked with Fermilab physicist Juan Estrada during his first summer in the DOE ACTS program. Here, Smith and Estrada test components they plan to install in a dark matter detector.

Next fall, students at Hereford High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, will get a peek at cosmic rays streaming into their classrooms from sources light-years away. They'll hear firsthand tales of working with some of the world's smartest scientists. If they're lucky, they'll get to try out a device designed to detect dark matter, one of the universe's most mysterious substances.

And that's just the beginning of what teacher Jeremy Smith hopes to bring back for students from eight weeks of research at Fermilab.

Smith is one of 11 teachers working at the laboratory through the Department of Energy's Academies Creating Teacher Scientists program. The three-year ACTS program brings middle and high school teachers to national laboratories across the country, where they spend one to two months each summer immersed in pioneering research. High school teachers such as Smith take part in a different area of Fermilab research each year, while middle school teachers focus on research in the first year and education issues in the second and third years.

"We help teachers build the skills needed for scientific investigation, and we show them ways to translate that into classroom practice," said Spencer Pasero, education program leader at Fermilab. "We also give them tools to make a broader impact at their home school," he added, noting that the middle school teachers are currently devising a professional development program for fellow teachers at their home schools.

Before this summer, Smith said he knew only the basics about dark matter and dark energy. Now, he's working with Fermilab astrophysicist Juan Estrada to develop a detector for possible dark matter particles.

"I'm trying to get Jeremy involved in all parts of the process," Estrada explained. "First, I had him looking at data we collected in the past. Then he worked on the calibration of our detector, and now he is learning about how detectors function at the level of the hardware itself."

Smith can't wait to take the lessons-and, pending a small grant, some surplus particle detectors-back to school.

"Kids get very excited about astrophysics," he said. "To have this experience, working on the real research projects, is very valuable."

-- Rachel Carr

Office of Science director, deputy director get behind-the-scenes Fermilab tour

On Thursday, Department of Energy Office of Science Director William Brinkman visited Fermilab with Office of Science Deputy Director for Science Programs Pat Dehmer and Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics Dennis Kovar. After listening to a briefing given by Fermilab Director Pier Oddone about the future of the laboratory and discussing the scientific opportunities with Fermilab theorists, the group received a tour of the CDF experiment, NuMI tunnel and the MINOS detector.

CDF's Britney Rutherford of Fermilab (far left) and DZero's Dale Johnston of the University of Nebraska (far right) give William Brinkman, Pat Dehmer and Dennis Kovar (center, left to right) a tour of the CDF detector.

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone explains the MINOS experiment to DOE Office of Science Director William Brinkman (right) as they walk through the NuMI tunnel, 350 feet underground.

Running at half-energy keeps LHC in race for discoveries

From Science, Aug. 14, 2009

The world's largest atom smasher will finally start blasting particles together this winter, but at only half of its maximum energy, officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, decided last week. Officials say that energy is low enough to ensure that the 27-kilometer-long, $5.5 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will not wreck itself the way it did last fall, just 9 days after circulating its first beams (Science, 26 September 2008, p. 1753). But the energy is also high enough, physicists say, to give the LHC a shot next year at surpassing its rival, the aging Tevatron collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, which holds the record for the highest-energy collisions.

CERN officials have dialed down the energy to keep from overloading faulty electrical connections between the thousands of superconducting magnets that guide protons around the LHC (Science, 31 July, p. 522). Current doesn't normally flow through the questionable connections, but they need to be able to carry thousands of amps should the superconducting wire in the magnets warm up and lose its ability to carry electricity without resistance. Running at half-energy, "we have a safety margin of 2 or 2.5," says Stephen Myers, director of accelerators and technology at CERN. "It's a very conservative approach."

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