Modernization of Education in Nuclear and Particle Physics - Swiss-Bulgarian Partnership

SCOPES 2005-2008: Final scientific report for the

Modernization of education in nuclear and particle physics - Swiss-Bulgarian partnership (BUCHEDU)

General Information

1.1Title of the IP: Modernization of education in nuclear and particle physics - Swiss-Bulgarian partnership (BUCHEDU)

1.2Number of the IP: IB7420-110914

1.3Starting date, duration of the IP, duration of extension 01.10.2005 – 30.09.2007 with extension up to 31.12.2008

1.4Names of co-ordinator and the leaders of the partner teams including the home institutions and cities

Co-ordinator:Prof. Alain Blondel, Department of Nuclear and Particle Physics, University of Geneva, Geneva

Leader of the Bulgarian team: Prof. Roumen Tsenov, Department of Atomic Physics, University of Sofia, Sofia

1. Overview of activities

2.1Recapitulate the objectives of the IP.

BUCHEDU is a collaboration between the Department of Atomic Physics of the University of Sofia and the Département de Physique Nucléaire et Corpusculaire at University of Geneva.

The goals of the project have encompassed implementation of modern multimedia tools, web site and easy access to it for students, update of teaching methodology by transfer of knowledge, methods, technology and lecturers between partners, modernization of student laboratory equipment and revealing for the students the international nature of research in the field and make them aware of the existence and availability of leading centers abroad such as University of Geneva and nearby CERN where research practice and/or Masters or PhD work could be done. Related activities have included acquisition of multimedia equipment, modernization of students’ laboratories, exchange visits of lecturers aiming at know-how transfer and lecturing, organization of students’ summer schools, sending best graduates for diploma work to University of Geneva and/or CERN, as well as launching of balanced and well focused advertising program. BUCHEDU has targeted competitiveness of the young scientists educated in Bulgaria through a coordinated and modern Master program in Nuclear and Particle Physics & Radioecology.

2.2Which work has been carried out by each of the institutions? Have the activities been in accordance with the global concept in the application? If not, in what respect and why?

The bulk of the work has been done within the Department of Atomic Physics in Sofia with the essential help, support and supervising of the partners from the Department of Nuclear and Particle Physics in Geneva.

Below we will go briefly through the specific activities.

One of the lecture halls of the Faculty of Physics, namely A315 (60 places), has been allocated for lectures and other educational and scientific activities related to the Master program of Nuclear and Particle Physics & Radioecology. It has been given for exclusive use of the Department of Atomic Physics and, by decision of the Faculty Council, has been named after Professor Elisaveta Karamihailova(1897 - 1968)[1], the first professor of Atomic and Nuclear Physics at the University of Sofia and founder of the Department. The hall has been completely renovated and equipped with necessary multimedia devices using project resources. It is used now for almost all lectures and seminars of the program curriculum as well as for teaching of Atomic, Nuclear and Particle Physics for undergraduate students. The modern multimedia equipment and furnishing of the hall attract more students to the lectures and increase considerably the effectiveness of the teaching process.

For further facilitating of the educational process a Web-server has been set up. A dedicated machine with 250 GB RAID disk space has been purchased, installed and configured. For better Internet connection of this machine and higher bandwidth for the whole department a fast optical fiber link to the University computing center situated in the building of Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics has been laid down. The work has been done in cooperation with and expenses shared with a project on setting-up GRID cluster in premises of the department and with neighboring Department of Theoretical Physics. The bandwidth is high enough to allow fast access to the link point in the University computing center for all three users.

Web-site, based on Plone content management system[2], has been set up, see It is extensively used to communicate educational material to the students as well as for other needs of teaching, research and administrative service of the department. The site has almost reached its designed scale in Bulgarian language. Work is in progress to fully develop the respective part in English.

Greatly facilitated by the existence of the Web-server, quite a number of electronic versions of lectures in Nuclear and Particle Physics, Radioecology, Medical Physics, Computing and Programming and other educational material have been developed by the lecturers in the department and uploaded on the server.

The content can be accessed at (in Bulgarian) and the list is given in the Annex 8.

Along with enlarging the educational material available electronically we have purchased a number of textbooks that are recommended in the curricula of the courses and made them available to the students. The list of books in our small library is given in the Annex 12.

The next important result of BUCHEDU realization has been the modernization of equipment in our students laboratories.

Necessary materials, components and equipment have been acquired for the Laboratory of Nuclear Electronics through BUCHEDU funds including a fast sampling digital oscilloscope (Tektronix TDS2024B).

Some additional space has been allocated for the students at the Laboratory of Dosimetry and Radiation Protection (office B32) which is certified for work with sealed radioactive sources. A working place, equipped with desktop computer has been organized there to facilitate students work during the practical exercises.This Laboratory is responsible for practical exercises within several courses of the Master program like Dosimetry and Radiation protection, Radioactivity in the environment and Radioecology, Metrology of ionizing radiation, Monte Carlo simulation of radiation transport.

Part of the project funding has been spent for repair (vacuum restoration and maintenance) of the high purity Germanium (HPGe) detector (ORTEC, relative efficiency 24%) in use in the students laboratory exercises for more than 20 years. After the reparation, the HPGe detector is being used in the laboratory exercises in the Dosimetry and Radiation protection course, where the students are acquainted with the basic concepts of gamma spectrometry – energy calibration, identification of nuclides and activity measurements. It is used also in the Radioactivity in the environment and Radioecologycourse, where the emphasis is onactivity measurements of environmental samples taken during the field exercises. The detector is used also in the laboratory exercises of the Metrology of ionizing radiationcourse, where more insights of the precise gamma spectrometry analysis are given to the students. These include efficiency calibration and calculation of self attenuation corrections in gamma spectrometry of bulk samples. A new device for measurement of surface contamination with beta emitters has been purchased from RADOS Technology GmbH - a MICROCONT II contamination monitor with beta plastic scintillation detector for beta-contamination (RBP-170). The monitor is intended for use in the exercises of the Radioactivity in the environment and RadioecologyandMetrology of ionizing radiationcourses. It has been put in use in the laboratory practice in the Radioactivity in the environment and Radioecologycourse, where it is used to teach students how to measure and evaluate surface contamination. It is also used in the Metrology of ionizing radiationcourse, where the accent is on training in calibration and tests of surface contamination monitors. The monitor has been the basic experimental apparatus for the completion of one bachelor thesis in the 2008/2009 academic year [3].

In course of the project realization one of the premises of the department has been turned into a Master and Ph.D. students office. The room offers four work places equipped with middle class desktop PCs connected to LAN and calm atmosphere for study, Internet surfing, common discussions. It is fully occupied all the time and we are thinking now about possibilities to find and allocate more space for similar purposes.

Analyzing interim results of the project during its realization it became evident that we should put also some efforts on modernization of teaching in the general courses of Atomic and Nuclear & Particle Physics for all undergraduate students in the Faculty of Physics. These are the courses that give first insight on the subject and could ignite an interest and attract students to our Master programs. And the feeling was that we had to start with the students Laboratory. The equipment in the laboratory has not been renewed for the last two decades. Within the BUCHEDU project two experiments were purchased from the Phywe System GmbH & Co. KG. These are the Franck-Hertz experiment (with Hg-tube and Ne-tube) and the experiment to measure the specific charge of the electron - e/m. The Franck-Hertz experiment is one of the historical experimentsthatfirst proves the quantum nature of atoms. Performing this experiment with Ne-tube allows students to see the effect and to get a basic understanding of the experiment in a clear, intuitive way. On the other hand the same experiment performed with Hg-tube allows for measurement ofsome quantities, such as the energy of the first excited state in Hg and the mean free path of the electrons in the gas at different temperatures. The experiment for determination of the specific charge of the electrons is another example of exercise that demonstrates a physics effect (in this particular case the motion of accelerated charged particles in a magnetic filed) clearly and visually. These two experiments, obtained within the BUCHEDU project, greatly improved the attractiveness of the Laboratory of Atomic and Nuclear physics for the students. In order to train the undergraduate students to work with both digital and analog oscilloscopes we have purchased a digital Rigol DS5042M (two channel, 40 MHz) and an analog Instek GOS-652G (two channel, 50 MHz) oscilloscopes. The laboratory was also equipped with three Charts of Nuclides (7th edition 2006).

One of the main instruments foreseen in the project for increasing the attractiveness and quality of teaching of Nuclear and Particle Physics in the department was exchange of visits of lecturers and organizing of summer schools for the students. Two summer schools have been organized, both in Bulgaria, in the small and beautiful Black Sea resort of Primorsko.

The original intention to organize one of the schools in Geneva or around was found not very appropriate due to the tight schedule of the Geneva partners and quite high cost of the travel and accommodation there. The schools in Bulgaria have been combined with the national conferences on Particle Physics, namely the second [4] and the third [5] one. The programs [6],[7] of the events encompassed general lectures on Particle Physics and beyond in the mornings given by senior lecturers and talks of younger participants (graduate and Ph.D. students, postdocs, etc.) on their current work, in the afternoons.

The Second National Conference and School on Particle Physics3 was held in 2007 from 5th to 10th of June attracting more than 30 participants from the Faculty of Physics and Faculty of Mathematic and Informatics of the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, University of Geneva, CERN, Institute of Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy (INRNE) of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Heidelberg University. The list of participants is available here[8]. Approximately 20 hours of lectures were delivered and they included electroweak precision tests, supersymmetry, cosmology and neutrino physics. Reports on important ongoing and future major experiments in the field like CMS, MICE, ALICE, MAGIC, NA48, LHCb, etc. have been given. The program of the lectures and talks can be found within the CERN “Indico” event management system5.

The Third National Conference and School on Particle Physics4 was held in 2008 from 12th to 18th of June with more than 25 participants [9] from Faculties of Physics, Mathematic and Informatics of the University of Sofia, University of Plovdiv (Bulgaria), CERN, INRNE (BAS, Bulgaria) and University of Liverpool (UK). The lecture program 6 covered also some special cases of theories extending the Standard Model like Split Supersymmetry, Maximal mass model and CP violation within Supersymmetry. A special set of lectures was devoted to gravitation and physics goals of the GLAST/PLANK gamma ray telescope. The participants presented the current status of their research in High Energy Physics, too.

The next important aim of the project was to open possibilities for the best students to take part in research activities in the Department of Nuclear and Particle Physics of Geneva University and/or CERN and prepare their diploma theses there. Three students have been sent to Geneva altogether. The graduate student Mirena Ivova was sent for 2 months (July and August 2007) to the Department of Nuclear and Particle Physics of the Geneva University. She prepared her diploma thesis there under the supervision of Dr. A. Bravar. Along with that Mirena attended the CERN Summer Students lecture programme that gave her wider knowledge and a new insight to the field of Particle Physics. Two other students, Galin Vylchev and Martin Vachovsky were sent for one month (September 2008) to CERN to participate in the NA61 experiment under supervision of Assoc. Prof. Dimitar Kolev. That practice was foreseen in their curriculum, it proved very important for broadening of their education in Particle Physics and acquiring practical skills in the field and led to Bachelor diploma theses. The references for their performance are very positive.

Two undergraduate students, Yordan Madzhunkov and Georgi Gerganov, were supported partially to participate in the 2008 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging conference, where they are co-authors in two posters presented in the conference [10].

The BUCHEDU project has given means to the Department of Atomic Physics to pursue active advertising of the Master program, education in Physics with specialization in Nuclear and Particle Physics & Radioecology, and of thedepartment in general. Two leaflets (see Annexes 1 & 2) and three posters (see Annexes 3, 4, 5) have been designed, printed and widely distributed. The first leaflet presents the Department of Atomic Physics, second one is focused on the Master program of Nuclear and Particle Physics & Radioecology; the posters inform about this program and the one of Medical Physics, where the department is involved, too. The leaflets and posters are distributed among students in the University of Sofia and other higher schools in the city. Also, they have been mailed with special cover letters asking to exposure them to student audience to all higher schools and universities in Bulgaria and Bolkan countries where Physics faculties/departments exist. The distribution lists are given in the Annex 9.

During the special annual events organized by the Faculty of Physics and focused on advertising the higher education in Physics among high-school pupils, so called “The Open Doors Days”, on 15th April 2006, 21st April 2007 and 19th April 2008, the Department of Atomic Physics and the Master Programs it offers were widely presented and advertised.

Two special events have been organized in the frame of the project to promote the role of the Department of Atomic Physics in higher education in Bulgaria and research in Subatomic Physics and to increase its visibility in the society.

The first one was the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Department (founded in 1946).The event took place on 11th May 2006 at the Faculty of Physics. There were memorial and scientific lectures, historical exposition and social events (see Annex 10). Invitations were sent to the Rector of the University, its Rector’s council, other faculties of sciences, all departments of the Faculty of Physics, external organizations with relations to the department. Retired members of the department and students were invited, too. Attendance was remarkable (more than 100 people). The Rector was present in person and addressed the department as well as many other guests did. The event was a great success and contributed in an extreme degree to advertising scientific and educational activities of the Department, as well as of its impact to Bulgarian science and society.

The second event was a one week (26th of May to 1st of June 2008) series of lectures for students under the heading “Department of Atomic Physics Around the World”. Former members and students of the department have been invited to give lectures on the subjects in the field they work in and presentations on their present activities. The list of invited speakers is given bellow:

1. D-r Asen Kirov (Memroial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA)
2. D-r Valentin Yordanov (Yantel, LLC. Los Alamos, USA)
3. D-r Venelin Angelov (Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Deutschland)
4. D-r Georgi Velev (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Illinois, USA)
5. D-r Georgi Georgiev (CentredeSpectrométrieNucléaireetdeSpectrométriedeMasse, CNRS, Orsay, France)
6. D-r Ivan Kojuharov (GSI Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt, Deutschland)
7. Panayotis Kritidis (Environmental Radioactivity Laboratory, NCSR "Demokritos" , Athens, Greece)
8. D-r Stefan Tzenov (STFC Daresbury Laboratory, Accelerator Science and Technology Centre, Daresbury, UK)

The event was well advertised on the Web (see [11]), by posters (see Annex 11) and personal invitations and the attendance of the lectures was very high. A wide variety of topics have been covered – from nuclear safety to detector development and from Nuclear to Particle Physics. Lectures represented both the fundamental and applied science. This series also found place in the Bulgarian media. The daily newspaper “Trud” published large article about the event (No. 142, 25.05.2008, p.10, see Annex 13) as well as the newspaper “Azbuki”[12] of the Ministry of Education and Science (No.22, 4-10 June 2008, p.9, see Annex 7). This specific “educational” conference showed to be very successful for the attraction of new students to the field of Subatomic Physics. It also facilitated strengthening and broadening of international and inter-institutional contacts important for the better realization of the students.