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In this period of COVID-19 emergency, online inquiry-based educational paths are of crucial importance for school. Here, we present a didactic path for training high-school teachers to be developed online, using as a starting point the physics of neutron stars. Our aim is to train teachers in performing at distance inquiry activities based on real experimental data and in acquiring the skills to use such activities in classwork. The path is scheduled to be tested for the first time in Spring 2021.

The ALICE Collaboration is proposing a completely new apparatus, ALICE 3, for the LHC Runs 5 and beyond. In this context, a key subsystem for high-energy charged particle identification will be a proximity-focusing ring-imaging Cherenkov detector using aerogel as radiator and silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) as photon sensors. We assembled a small-scale prototype instrumented with Hamamatsu S13352 and S13361-3075AE-08 SiPM arrays, readout by custom boards equipped with front-end Petiroc 2A ASICs. The Cherenkov radiator consisted of a 2 cm thick hydrophobic aerogel tile with a refractive index of 1.03 separated from the SiPM plane by a 23 cm expansion gap. The prototype was successfully tested in a campaign at the CERN PS T10 beam line with the goal of validating the design bRICH specifications in terms to achieve the target separation power. We measured a single photon angular resolution of 3.8 mrad at the Cherenkov angle saturation value of 242 mrad, as well as the expected scaling of the angular resolution with the increasing number of detected photons. We also studied the contribution of uncorrelated and correlated background sources with respect to the signal and proved the effectiveness of time matching between charged tracks and photon hits to achieve efficient suppression of the SiPM dark count rate background. In this paper, the detector concept, the description of the tested prototype layout and the main beam test results are reported.

Physics teachers’ training and professional development play a crucial role in preparing schools for the countless challenges they face. One of the central issues in the preparation of teachers is to provide them with tools, strategies, and methods to be able to build bridges between school and society, particularly to find fruitful links between formal, non-formal, and informal teaching, starting from primary school. In this paper, we report on some discussions developed during the Malta 2020 webinar by the Work Group 4 (WG4) participants, together with some questions and answers that emerged.

An innovative teaching sequence on underwater diving Physics has been experimented for nine years in a High School in Milano (Italia) to help teachers and students to build a deep comprehension of the wave phenomena. This activity involves all the 15-year-old students attending their second year in the school together with their teachers. It has been implemented under the supervision of the Milano City Police Diving Division in collaboration with the Physics Department of the University of Milan. Many Physics issues, such as optics, acoustics, heat, fluids and dynamics laws, can be explored under water. In the presented contribution the focus will be on the main features of acoustic and electromagnetic waves propagation through air and water by using common descriptors like impedance and energy. The presented proposal may be used as a case study on how to improve the physics teachers’ skills to innovate their educational approach in full autonomy.

We discuss a study about Italian upper secondary school, undergraduate and graduate students' and teacher's misunderstanding in dealing with electromagnetic induction. We suspect that most difficulties, that we found substantially common at all levels of education, come from the very poor link, generally presented in teaching, between the Faraday's law and the Lorentz force. We also suggest that the understanding of inductive phenomena/problems/exercises could benefit from taking into account also the magnetic vector potential \"point of view\".

Young generations are less and less interested in studying STEM subjects. For this reason, numerous studies have strongly suggested a change in the methods scientific knowledge is developed in the learners, through the use of alternative and more creative strategies. In recent decades a strong interaction between scientific subjects and the arts has been established by means of theatre. The objective is to bring science to students and the public in ways that are engaging, instructive, artistic and, always, content-driven: the medium is the arts; the message is the joy of science. When we talk about Physics in a theatre show, are we only making a good dissemination or are we also transmitting contents and changing the nature of science view of the audience? In order to address this question, after the augmented lecture titled \"There are no things inside things\", we invited the audience to answer both to a closed-answer survey about the performance and to an open-ended questionnaire focused on the theme \"what is understanding?\", in terms of physics contents and NoS view. In this contribution, we analyze and discuss the answers provided by the people who have attended the augmented lecture. The analysis of the answers shows that the performance was appreciated as an example of showmanship in facing the wide-range cultural message of physics.

Relativistic jets around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are well-known powerfulγ -ray emitters. In absence of the jets in radio-quiet active galactic nuclei (AGNs), how the SMBHs work inγ -ray bands is still unknown despite of great observational efforts made in the last 3 decades. Considering the previous efforts, we carefully select an AGN sample composed of 37 nearby Seyfert galaxies with ultra-hard X-rays for the goals ofγ -ray detections by excluding all potential contamination in this band. Adopting a stacking technique, here we report the significantγ -ray detection ( \\rm TS=30.6 , or5.2 σ ) from the sample using 15-year Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) observation. We find an averageγ -ray luminosity of the sample as(1.5±1.0)×10⁴⁰ \\rm erg s⁻¹at energies from 1-300 GeV. Limited by the well-known pair production from the interaction ofγ -rays with low energy photons,≳several GeVγ -rays are found to originate from an extended corona ( ∼ 2.7× 10⁶ R_(\\rm g) ), whereas the canonical much more compact X-ray corona ( ∼ 10 R_(\\rm g) ) is responsible for 1 to several GeVγ -rays. The finding of the compact region lends to strong supports to the long-time theoretical expectations, but the extended corona is beyond all the existing models. One promising scenario is that the electron-positron pairs produced in the compact X-ray corona would expand as fireball, similar to that inγ -ray bursts, forming the structure of extended corona.

A 17-year-old boy presented with a painless, right superotemporal orbital mass. Imaging demonstrated a lacrimal gland mass extending into the temporalis muscle through the lateral orbital wall. The patient underwent an orbital exenteration. Histopathology revealed malignant mixed tumor (carcinoma ex-pleomorphic adenoma) of the lacrimal gland with perineural and vascular invasion.

In this work, we present a novel compact particle identification (PID) detector concept based on Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) optimized to perform combined Ring-Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) and Time-of-Flight (TOF) measurements using a common photodetector layer. The system consists of a Cherenkov radiator layer separated from a photosensitive surface equipped with SiPMs by an expansion gap. A thin glass slab, acting as a second Cherenkov radiator, is coupled to the SiPMs to perform Cherenkov-based charged particle timing measurements. We assembled a small-scale prototype instrumented with various Hamamatsu SiPM array sensors with pixel pitches ranging from 2 to 3 mm and coupled with 1 mm thick fused silica window. The RICH radiator consisted of a 2 cm thick aerogel tile with a refractive index of 1.03 at 400 nm. The prototype was successfully tested in beam test campaigns at the CERN PS T10 beam line with pions and protons. We measured a single-hit angular resolution of about 4 mrad at the Cherenkov angle saturation value and a time resolution better than 50 ps RMS for charged particles with Z = 1. The present technology makes the proposed SiPM-based PID system particularly attractive for space applications due to the limited detector volumes available. In this work, we present beam test results obtained with the detector prototype and we discuss possible configurations optimized for the identification of ions in space applications.

The ALICE Collaboration is proposing a completely new apparatus, ALICE~3, for the LHC Runs~5 and beyond. In this context, a key subsystem for high-energy charged particle identification will be a proximity-focusing ring-imaging Cherenkov detector using aerogel as radiator and silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) as photon sensors. We assembled a small-scale prototype instrumented with Hamamatsu S13352 and S13361-3075AE-08 SiPM arrays, readout by custom boards equipped with front-end Petiroc 2A ASICs. The Cherenkov radiator consisted of a 2 cm thick hydrophobic aerogel tile with a refractive index of 1.03 separated from the SiPM plane by a 23 cm expansion gap. The prototype was successfully tested in a campaign at the CERN PS T10 beam line with the goal of validating the design bRICH specifications in terms to achieve the target separation power. We measured a single photon angular resolution of 3.8~mrad at the Cherenkov angle saturation value of 242~mrad, as well as the expected scaling of the angular resolution with the increasing number of detected photons. We also studied the contribution of uncorrelated and correlated background sources with respect to the signal and proved the effectiveness of time matching between charged tracks and photon hits to achieve efficient suppression of the SiPM dark count rate background. In this paper, the detector concept, the description of the tested prototype layout and the main beam test results are reported.