A week in review

It's been a busy week since heading out of Sioux Falls on Saturday, but now a week later I am proud to say I am at Princeton University where the last three weeks of this great program will soon come to an end. Unfortunately, this past week from Sioux Falls to Princeton has been super busy, therefore I have not had the chance to blog about what we did. So I will do that now. In Ely, the group canoed than went to the Soudan mine. Bad circumstances lead to the fact that our group could no longer go down to tour the Soudan lab. However, it was great to learn about MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search). MINOS is an experiment where a muon neutrino beam from Fermilab is shot to the Soudan lab. The number of neutrinos is compared between the two labs to gain more knowledge about neutrino oscillation. After the Soudan lab, we traveled to see the experiment NOvA. The NOvA experiment also uses a beam from Fermilab to discover more abouts neutrinos such as how they oscillate and more about Antineutrinos vs. neutrinos. From NOva we traveled to Duluth, got some great rest time, then traveled to Madison, WI. At Madison we got to see some more experiments such as the ICECUBE experiment which is yet another neutrino detecting experiment except that this one is in the South Pole. After hearing about the ICECUBE experiment, our group went and learned about geology at Madison University. It was very interesting to see how earth is viewed on a couple of deep sea maps and how some recent earthquakes have changed the earth a bit. Fermilab was a Thursday and a Friday event. At Fermilab the group was given a great tour and we were shown the beams that are going to experiments NOvA and MINOS. It was also great to see Fermilab for the fact that they will soon send a beam to the Sanford Lab in the near future. Well, after Fermilab came Chicago and from Chicago we all ended up at Princeton safely. I Can't wait to see what awaits us these next couple of weeks with the Italian students.

Ciao!
Jessica