ABSTRACT
The outreach program "A scuola di Astroparticelle” was proposed in 2016 by the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN - Napoli Division) in collaboration with the Physics Department "Ettore Pancini” of the Federico II University in Napoli, CNR-SPIN and CNR-ISASI Institutes. Its main goal is to engage teachers and students of High Schools in astroparticle physics projects. For the third edition (2018/19), the activities, which are also part of the Italian Educational Program PCTO - "Percorsi per le Competenze Trasversali e per l'Orientamento”, involved 18 schools for a total of 21 projects on several topics. Some projects were strictly related to astroparticles as cosmic rays, while others were more technical, as the development of particle detectors, or cross-disciplinary projects. Students worked for the entire school year and prepared materials for the final event. More than 600 students attended the event and presented their work to a jury with a poster and an oral presentation in plenary sessions. Since 2018, the program is part of OCRA - Outreach Cosmic Ray Activities - a national outreach project of INFN with the aim of collecting, within a common framework, the numerous outreach activities in cosmic-ray field carried out at the local level. The fourth edition (2019-20), in spite of the difficult situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has also seen the participation of 22 schools that carried out part of the activities in an online format. The project realized using the open data of the Pierre Auger Observatory will be presented in detail. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
ABSTRACT
The Cosmic Ray Cube is a portable tracking device conceived for outreach activities allowing a direct scientific experience for secondary school students. In the context of the PTOLEMY project, the detector was used to measure the differential muon flux inside the bunker of Monte Soratte, a suitable location at about 50 km north of Rome (Italy). Its simple operation was crucial to finalise the measurements, carried out during the Covid-19 lockdown in a site devoid of scientific equipment. The fine scanning of the differential muon rate highlights the details of the mountain above the bunker providing a map of the thickness of the rock which surrounds the detector. The result shows a muon flux at the Soratte hypogeum of about two orders of magnitude lower than the one observed on the surface. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.
ABSTRACT
In the context of the Ptolemy project, the need for a site with a rather low cosmogenic induced background led us to measure the differential muon flux inside the bunker of Monte Soratte, located about 50 km north of Rome (Italy). The measurement was performed with the Cosmic Ray Cube (CRC), a portable tracking device. The simple operation of CRC was crucial to finalise the measurement, as it was carried out in a site devoid of scientific equipment and during the COVID-19 lockdown. The muon flux measured at the Soratte hypogeum is about two orders of magnitude lower than the flux observed on the surface, suggesting the use of the Soratte bunker for hosting astroparticle physics experiments in which a low environmental background is required.