Portrait of Antonino Zichichi at Polar QuEEEst Conference

Built by school students from Switzerland, Italy, Iceland and Norway at CERN, Polar QuEEEst is a special detector to catch cosmic rays coming from the distant regions of our universe. Three of these special “telescopes” will be built to measure the cosmic ray flux at different latitudes, with one of them on board Nanuq and the two others installed in the schools of the students from Italy and Norway who will build them. The project is part of the Extreme Energy Events - Science Inside Schools (EEE) project coordinated by the Museo storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi (Centro Fermi), an Italian research institute with its headquarters in the historic building of the old Institute of Physics in via Panisperna in Rome, where Enrico Fermi made his famous studies on the importance of slowing down the neutrons to produce induced radioactivity. The EEE project combines an experiment on cosmic rays studies with an intense program of scientific culture dissemination with the direct participation of students from Italian high schools (more than 100 institutes presently involved). A network of 50 more sophisticated "telescopes" for cosmic rays is installed in Italy, all put in coincidence using GPS, with the goal to detect cosmic muons produced by primary cosmic rays of the highest energy. The Polar QuEEEst detectors will join the present network allowing the study of cosmic rays at latitudes till now not well covered. CERN, INFN Bologna and INFN Bari collaborate to this project.