REU Site - Frontier Physics and Astronomy Research with Technical Presentations

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This award supports an REU site at the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The main objective of the UCLA REU Frontier Physics and Astronomy Research with Technical Presentations is to encourage students, including women, underrepresented minorities, and students from institutions with limited research facilities to pursue careers in physics, astrophysics and science in general. The program is aimed at a geographically and culturally diverse group and thus students are recruited nationally and special effort is made to target 4-year institutions, historically black colleges and traditional womens colleges. The core of the programs activities consist of a 10-week research project under the supervision of a UCLA faculty member. The projects span the various fields represented in the department, such as plasma physics, condensed matter physics, cosmic ray physics, high energy physics, astrophysics, and biophysics. These research experiences have been supplemented by other auxiliary training such as a machine shop workshop, a scientific computing workshop, a physics GRE prep course and a weekly faculty seminar series. Social activities supplement the academic activities in an effort to foster a sense of community among the group and within the department. Furthermore, students are housed in the dormitories on campus along with all other summer research students from other departments (altogether about 100 live together) to further facilitate social interaction. The focus of the proposed REU program is to convey to the student participants the full range of activities involved in the research process. The full gamut includes carefully defining the project in a realistic way to actually carrying out the planned research activities (a mix of data acquisition, data analysis, theoretical exploration, and final interpretations) to the written and oral presentation of the final results. Each of the students is required to submit a paper written in a professional format and must present a 20-minute power point presentation at our end-of-program symposium. This program seeks to provide the participants with 1) acquisition of skills in physics which can only come from participation in ongoing frontier level research, 2) a clear vision of what it means to do research, and to be a member of a community of researchers, and 3) some confidence that they are capable of meaningful contributions to a research program.