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Cosmic Ray Telescope Project Home Page

This is the parent site for Mini-Laboratoary for Cosmic Ray Telescope Project. It provides the most up to date informations about the whole experimental project (Student experimental projects you did is one part of it). Not to mention that it provide hyperlink for related sites about the same topics in North America. You may handle the similar experimental projects as described in the previous site. So, don't bother to take a look with the homepage listed below. The mini-laboratory site is embeded within it, you need not link the page externally.http://www.phy.cuhk.edu.hk/astroworld/cosmic/

You may not familiar to the experimental setup. In this page, there is section about introduction to cosmic ray telescope, including hardware introductions and its picture, semantic diagram for how the appratus be assembled. Look at this page before starting any experiment. http://www.phy.cuhk.edu.hk/astroworld/cosmic/crtelescope.html

Cosmic ray telescope project aim to monitor high energy particles, photons from universe. Some background materials are provided in the site. Some materials are still under construction. The topic listed about is the most basis knowledge to tackle student projects. It is strongly recommend you to understand the topics throughtfully.

Cosmic Ray Telescope Project Home Page provide a comprehensive on line reference as mentioned above. Here is the link http://www.phy.cuhk.edu.hk/astroworld/cosmic/related.html TARGET="cosmic_contents". As you are the participant for mini-laboratoary experimental project. You may concern the following subtopics.

  • School-based Project
  • Cosmic Ray and its articles
  • Timing and Positioning
  • Cosmic Ray Source (including Gamma Ray Burst, Supernova Remnant)

ALTA Home Page

There is a project named (ALTA) collaborated by Unversity of Alberta. ALTA stands for The Alberta Large Area Time Coincidence Array. High schools are involved in the project and covers a monitoring area about 30000 km2 . In Hong Kong, our site cover an  area around 1000 km2 . A large effective area is helpful to study the high energy cosmic ray. The homepage is http://pneuma.phys.ualberta.ca/~alta/  Some related materials is bollowed and listed below.

The following page will give you a tutorial about basic concepts of cosmic ray physics.Students' introduciton to the ALTA CTS On-line Course

The following page will teach you how to write a scientific report.A Student guide to scientific report After finishing the experimental project, you may be required to submit a full report to your supervisor (ususally your teacher). The page shown above teach you about what should be included in a  scientific report.

The following page will give you a brief explanations on error handling techniques. The contents can be comparable with what you have learnt in secondary school physics.A Basic Introduction to Error Analysis  In a scientific report, you should always quote your experimental error together with your experimental result

Knowledgebase

Those are the suggested reference for you to read in order to prepare student projects. The level is appropriate enough for secondary school. Some of them are interactive homepage contains colorfully diagram and well presented topics. It is not required to read all materials in knowledgebase. You should able to select suitable materials which are relevant to the projects you are going to perform.

The page give a precise introduction of cosmic ray. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/cosmic.html If you click the index hyperlink in this page, you will find the homepage is actually a on line dictionary about Physics. For example, you can find material about Cerenkov radiation in the link http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/einvel.html. In other cosmic ray detector (rather than plastic scintillators in our project), detector may be a tank of water together with set of photomultiplier tubes. Relativistic particles (travelling  near light speed) will emit Cerenkov light in dielectric (e.g water). The light can be detected by photomultiplier tubes.You can also find materials in other fields rather than cosmic ray physics or astrophysics.

This page contain materials about astrophysics. The contents may be a little bit out of our scope. If you are interest, click the following link http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/Intro.html. Chapter 33 is a general discussion about cosmic ray. Chapter 1, 12, 20 explain the acceleration or blocking mechanism of incoming cosmic ray from universe. Chapter 16, 18, 30, 35 explains the cosmic ray from sun (Chapter 35 include acceleration processes occuring on our Sun). Chapter 34 discuss high energy particles from universe.

This page contains background theory and detection of extensive air shower http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/hfm/CosmicRay/Showers.html.

This is experimental project performed in Tian Shan ! The aim is to investigate extensive air showers with the use of NM64 neutron supermonitor http://www.lebedev.ru/structure/npad/tianshan_eas/index.html . However, Scintillator detectors array is also involved.

This page contains a short article about extensive air shower. It is very readable http://www.nucleonics-online.com/6f13.html. In the some site, there is also an article about sidereal variation (~23.93 hours) of cosmic radiation at the university Freiburg, Germany. http://www.nucleonics-online.com/6f1341.html

The page describe how to detect cosmic radiation in another approach (by using Water Cerenkov Detectors)http://www.lanl.gov/milagro/detecting_cosmic_rays.htm. You are free to skip this part.

This is another readable page which introduce extensive air showers http://ast.leeds.ac.uk/haverah/old/dets.shtml. A short discussion about scintillator detector is following http://ast.leeds.ac.uk/haverah/old/detector.shtml. (Also Water Cerenkov Detector exactly in the same page)

This a site describing a large scale detector array http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~starkm/thesis/detector.html. It also covers materials about data mining and analysis. The target of project is to search for Ultra-High Energy Emission from Cygnus X-3.

This page contain technical notes about asymmetry of air showers at ground level http://aupc1.uchicago.edu/~pryke/auger/documents/GAP-98-034/asym.html. The experiment is done by University of Chicago.

This page provide a complete introduction on GPS system. http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/gps/gps_f.html The technology about GPS system is standardized and released. The page cover almost everything about GPS timing and positioning technology. In student experiment, you are required to operate GPS receiver. You may find lots of strange terms or parameters during operation on GPS. I am sure you can find the answer in this homepage. The suggested topics are listed.

  • GPS is a Satellite Navigation System - Space Segment, Control Segment, User Sement. Go through those chapters if GPS system is new for you.
  • GPS Positioning Services Specified In The Federal Radionavigation Plan - Standard Position Service. SPS is used in our experiment.
  • GPS Data. This chapter is helpful for you to control GPS receiver in the experiment.
  • Position, Time from GPS. You may face difficulty in understanding some parameters shown in the commercial software WinOncore. For example, you don't know the definition of PRN shown in signal window in WinOncore. Futhermore, you may wish to understand how GPS receiver gather position and time according to pseudo range refered to satellites. This chapter will give you an full explanation and perhaps the details are far from AL Physics.
  • GPS Error Source. This is a core chapter if you need to perform data analysis about GPS data in student experiment.