This award supports a new international REU site hosted at the University of Michigan's Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences (CUOS) with research opportunities at Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole Nationale de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA), and the Institut d'Optique in Palaiseau, France. The students will be put into research teams that include 2 students, 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 9 weeks in Paris. Each student will keep weekly on-line research diaries for discussion in weekly video teleconferences with each full group. A CUOS research scientist will accompany the students to Paris and stay for two weeks to ensure that the students get a good start. The students will be housed in a local dormitory in Ann Arbor and at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. 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, nanomachining, art restoration and conservation, patterned biological cell templating, high power fiber lasers, plasma x-ray sources, dynamics of nano-magnetic materials, terahertz imaging, biomedical imaging with shaped pulses, fatigue life studies of materials, etc. This award is co-funded by the Physics Division and the Office of International Science and Engineering.
The Optics in the City of Light program is an international REU site in Paris France that focusses on ultrafast laser research. Twenty-four students have had an opportunity to work in a world class research laboratory in France from 2009 through 2011. The vast majority of the students are either in graduate school or plan to attend graduate school soon. The following description of our current program is taken from our website: www.engin.umich.edu/ipe/iREU This year the Optics in the City of Light Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) will offer 13 undergraduate junior level students the opportunity to spend 2 months in a variety of laboratories in Paris performing research with a wide range of ultrafast lasers. Optics, especially the new discoveries in Extreme Light, is one of the most exciting areas of science. Students in this program will experience strong collaborative science that is currently taking place between University of Michigan (UM) Center for Ultrafast Optical Science (CUOS), Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole Nationale de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA), Université Paris-Sud 11 Orsay, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan,Laboratoire de Recherche des Monuments Historiques, and l’Institut d' Optique Graduate School. Teams of faculty (one from Ann Arbor and one from Paris) will each direct an REU student on a collaborative project. Students will spend one week in Ann Arbor at CUOS for orientation, safety training, preparation for living in France, and immersion into the Ann Arbor laboratories of the REU faculty. Students will also learn basic lab skills as well as basic reporting skills. Students will begin the weekly reporting process that involves preparing a summary and analysis of the previous week’s work. Each student will also prepare a short presentation describing what they think they will be doing for their research in France. These presentations will be sent to the faculty involved in each project. In addition, each student will maintain an electronic notebook (like a blog) that all team members will be able to access.
