Program - Brookhaven National Laboratory

Laboratory Physics Association’s current efforts to ”modernize” undergraduate laboratory courses nationwide
(with an emphasis on affordable ”single-photon” experiments), it is important for instructors to be
conscious of the specific issues students face with the concepts behind such experiments, in particular
because of the black-box nature of the apparatus. This talk will also stress the importance of semi-classical
models of light detection, so that students can properly interpret their experimental data, and engage in
a true contrasting of competing theories, instead of simple ”confirmation”.
PR 72
Nuclear and Particle Physics Outreach at the Sanford Underground Research Facility
Peggy McMahan Norris, Benedict Sayler, Black Hills State University.
The Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, SD provides the facility and infrastructure for scientists
to study some of the most compelling questions about the history and fate of our universe through
its major experiments searching for direct evidence of dark matter and exploring the nature of neutrinos.
Early experiments currently in the installation phase are LUX, a direct search for dark matter (supported
by the U.S. high energy physics program), and the Majorana Demonstrator, a search for neutrinoless double
beta decay in Germanium (supported by the U.S. nuclear physics program). The Sanford Center for
Science Education (SCSE) is in the planning stages as the education component of the laboratory. The
mission of the SCSE is to draw upon the underground science and engineering, its human resources, its
unique facility and its setting within the Black Hills to inspire and prepare future generations of scientists,
engineers, and science educators. As work proceeds towards design of the building, institution, and
the programs and exhibits therein, early work has progressed towards establishing programs that build
capacity and partnerships and begin to prototype innovative educational programming and exhibits to
meet its educational vision. As the Sanford Lab education team explores innovative ways to convey the
excitement of the physics to audiences of all ages, successes and challenges from the first three years of
early educational programming will be highlighted in this presentation. Particular attention will be given
to those that draw on nuclear physics and chemistry: background radiation, gamma ray counting, cosmic
rays, weak interaction physics, etc.
PR 73
UMC with Multivariate Lognormal Probability Distributions for Nuclear Data Applications
G. Zerovnik, A. Trkov, Jozef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. R. Capote,
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Wagramer Strasse 5, P.O. Box 100, A-1400 Vienna,
Austria. D.L. Smith, Argonne National Laboratory.
Inherently positive parameters with large relative uncertainties (typically > 30%) are often considered to be
governed by the lognormal distribution. This assumption has the practical benefit of avoiding the possibility
of sampling negative values in stochastic applications. Recently the relations between multivariate lognormal
and normal distributions have been revisited. New relations between the correlation coefficients
of normal and log-normal distributions have been derived which hold independently of the uncertainty
value. The possibility of using the Unified Monte Carlo (UMC) technique for the evaluation of nuclear
reaction data assuming log-normal multivariate distributions is discussed in this paper. The mathematical
formalism is described and numerical examples are provided comparing normal and log-normal formulations
of the UMC for small and large uncertainties with results obtained using the Generalized Least Squares
(GLS) method. Suggestions for nuclear data applications are discussed.
Corresponding author: R. Capote
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