Neutrinos in the Classroom

Particle physics data in your classroom?

You can trust us: this project was developed by a collaboration of high school teachers and research physicists using data from the MINERvA experiment.

The science is real, and it works in the classroom. You don't have to be Einstein to do particle physics!

Our goal? To show your students how real scientists creatively solve problems and explore the unseen world of fundamental particles.


	Borrow our nanosecond stopwatch and time how long muons stopping in the MINERvA detector take to decay. Study a random process and measure properties, including half life, of radioactive decays. Learn more about the radioactive decay exercise		Be a detective and use conservation of energy and momentum to reconstruct the scattering of neutrinos from neutrons inside the nucleus. Learn more about the conservation of momentum and energy exercise

	Arachne is MINERvA's event display. In these exercises, a simple version of Arachne will allow the students to search for and analyze data from the MINERvA detector. Supported browsers include Chrome, Firefox, Safari, but not Internet Explorer (sorry). Test Arachne on your computer by looking at stream of consciousness data from MINERvA.		Resources for Your Classroom
			Learn more about activities for your classroom The primary resource document is a comprehensive teacher's guide for the set of exercises developed around the MINERvA data. In addition, we have developed a menu-themed list of activities."Appetizer" exercises are simple and introduce the basic concepts in the subatomic world. "Main course" activities include quantitative analysis of MINERvA data. "Dessert" activities are enrichment exercises that follow on from the main activities and allow your students to learn more. Choose as much or as little as your need for your curriculum. Explore the menu.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0619727 to the University of Rochester with a subaward to the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.