This award is to support the renewal of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site program at Nevis Labs, the laboratory for high energy physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics at Columbia University. The main focus of the program is student participation in original, cutting-edge physics research, working with a faculty mentor. The students will spend 10 weeks during the summer participating in the broad Nevis high energy physics and particle astrophysics research program, which seeks to address the most pressing issues of these fields, including the origin of mass, the question of neutrino oscillations, and the search for Dark Matter. Answers to these questions will have profound implications for our understanding of the fundamental structure and evolution of the universe. The REU program provides the opportunity for undergraduates to join in the excitement of these pursuits, as well as to participate in the development of the technological and computational tools required. Through an extensive series of lectures and lab visits, the students are also exposed to the most exciting problems in many other fields of physics. The educational experience offered by the REU program is complemented by the social experience of spending a summer in New York City.
We operated an REU Site at Nevis Laboratories, the high energy physics laboratory of Columbia University. A total of 9 undergraduates (8 funded by the REU Site funding) participated in the program each of the past 3 summers. The goal of the program was to provide undergraduate students, and particularly students from under-represented groups, first-hand experience in state-of-the-art scientific research, and to encourage them to consider pursuing graduate careers in science and engineering. The main activity of each student was active participation in the on-going research efforts of the Nevis physicists. The Nevis research program addresses a broad range of the most pressing issues of high energy physics. The research programs joined by the students included the ATLAS and DZero hadron collider experiments, the DoubleChooz and microBoone neutrino experiments, and the Xenon dark matter detection experiment. In addition to their research activities, the students participated in a series of seminars on topics of on-going research in physics. The seminar series included a total of 15 seminars covering a broad range of topics in experimental and theoretical particle physics, astrophysics, and condensed matter physics. The last week of the REU program was reserved for the preparation by the student of a written scientific report describing the research performed, and a short seminar-style presentation to the lab-wide audience. These steps exposed the students to the techniques of scientific writing, as well as the methods and practice of orally presenting their results to a scientific audience. In addition, the written reports serve as one measure of the accomplishments and effectiveness of the REU program itself. In an effort to increase the participation of underrepresented groups, the selected student participants included a large number of women and minorities, plus students from undergraduate-only institutions.
