VICTA

The VICTA (Vancouver Island Cosmic-ray Time-coincidence Array) project provides cosmic ray detectors and electronics to high school partners on Vancouver Island for use in their educational programs.  The equipment provided allows high school students to detect cosmic ray showers, measure the lifetime and speed of muons, to perform a test of special relativity, and in general to develop an understanding of a radiation detector and how subatomic particles are detected.

Each high school is provided with a set of scintillation detectors, and a computer controlled data acquisition system allowing these desktop experiments to be performed in the classroom.  Also the cosmic ray shower data from the various installations can be synchronized using event time stamps from the Global Positioning System (GPS), and the data aggregated, downloaded, and analyzed by all the students participating in VICTA.

Presently four high schools in the Greater Victoria area are participating in VICTA.

Please contact Lyle Robertson for more information.