Batavia, IL- Physics teachers Glen Deslich and Charles Wade of Sexton High School in Lansing, MI spent the last week of June in a different world; the subatomic world of particle physics, the land of the quarks and the leptons.

As the kick-off for their work in the QuarkNet Project, designed to bring forefront physics research into high-school classrooms, Deslich and Wade joined two dozen colleagues from across the US as university and laboratory research physicists led them through a week of seminars, tours and hands-on exploration at the nation's premier particle physics laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 40 miles west of Chicago.  The teachers are pioneers in a multi-year project that will ultimately involve 720 US high school physics teachers and allow tens of thousands of their students to participate in ongoing physics experiments at the scientific frontier.

Deslich and Wade will team up with physicist Dr. Joey Huston of Michigan State University to develop a local network of QuarkNet teachers and to create research-based classroom physics materials.  Using the World Wide Web, students will connect to ongoing high-energy physics experiments, first at FermiLab and, beginning about 2006, at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Geneva, Switzerland.  Students will investigate particle physics through live, online data from these experiments and accelerators.  Physicists, teachers and students will establish online dialogs to discuss experimental goals and progress and collaborate on data analysis.  Small groups of students will travel to FermiLab and CERN to report back to the schools on the status of the experiments and to interview the physicists involved.  Students will collaborate with other students around the country and the world.

"Our goal is to use the excitement and challenge of modern particle physics, as it is carried out today, to teach students the principles of physic," said FermiLab's Marjorie Bardeen, one of the project's organizers.  "We want students to see that physics is a living science and to understand the relevance of the physics that they learn in school."

At FermiLab, Deslich and Wade attended seminars with world-renowned physicists and observed physics experiments in real time.  The teachers watched the Laboratory's particle accelerators in action and analyzed detector data to determine characteristics of subatomic particles.

Following their FermiLab orientation, the teachers will spend seven weeks this summer as research assistants on actual physics experiments.

The multi-year QuarkNet project is sponsored jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, The University of Notre Dame, Hampton University, DOE's FermiLab and Lawrence Berkeley national Laboratories, and by the ATLAS and CMS experiments that will operate at CERN starting in the next ten years.

This second summer of QuarkNet included participants from : Brookhaven National Laboratory, Columbia University - Nevis Labs, Hampton University, Michigan State University, Southern Methodist University, State University of New York at Albany, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Riverside, the University of Chicago, the University of Florida, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Washington.  These institutions join thirteen that helped inaugurate QuarkNet last summer.  Additional universities will join at a rate of twelve per year to reach a total of sixty QuarkNet sites.

"Part of our commitment as physics researchers is to reach out to students who will be the next generation of our nation's scientists," Notre Dame's Randal Ruchti said.  "QuarkNet gives working physicists an opportunity to get directly involved with teachers and high school students, and to help them participate in scientific research and discovery."