REU Site: Modern Optics in the City of Light, A Collaborative REU Site in Paris

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This award supports the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site in Physics hosted at the University of Michigan. This international REU site, Modern Optics in the City of Light, will bring eight undergraduates to Paris each summer to conduct research, collaboratively, with faculty at the University of Michigan's Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences (CUOS) and several Parisian research institutions: the University of Paris-Sacley, Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole Nationale de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA), the Institut d'Optique Graduate School, Université Paris-Sud 11, and Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan. The students will be in research teams that include the student, a faculty member at UM and a faculty member in one of the Parisian institutions. The students will spend one week in Ann Arbor, followed by nine weeks in Paris. Each student will keep weekly on-line research diaries to aid in communication with each full group. A CUOS faculty member or research scientist will accompany the students to Paris and stay for one week to ensure that the students get a good start. The students will be housed in a local hotel in Ann Arbor and at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. The research that will be conducted will include both on-going collaborative projects between CUOS and the French institutions and new collaborative projects. The research in all projects will all involve the use of ultrafast lasers to discover very current, state-of-the art phenomena in a wide range of fields including  relativistic optics, plasma physics, materials spectroscopy, nano-machining, patterned biological cell templating, high power fiber lasers, plasma x-ray sources, dynamics of nano-magnetic materials, terahertz imaging, biomedical imaging with shaped pulses, and the fatigue life studies of materials , as well as other topics. This site is supported by the Physics REU program and by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.