This award supports the renewal of an REU site in the Department of Physics of the University of California at Davis. The REU students will be part of efforts to understand quantum gravity, develop photovoltaics from nanoparticles, pinpoint the age of the universe, cure prion diseases, and many more. Students are assigned to research labs based on their skills and stated interests. The program gives students views of physics not seen in typical coursework: first-hand experience of the joys and frustrations of research, and exposure to several types of physics careers. The students will benefit not only from their specific research projects but also from interactions with Davis faculty, graduate students, and other REU students; and from field trips showing physics-related work in diverse settings. At the end of the program, each participant gives a 15-minute research presentation and writes a short paper describing the work. There is a program of both formal and informal talks and discussions among the REU students and various faculty involved in the program. The REU site targets a mixed group of students, strongly encouraging applications from non-research institutions in northern California as well as selecting many participants from four-year colleges and universities across the nation. This award is supported by the Divisions of Physics and Materials Research in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
The UC Davis REU Program aims to provide summer research experiences for undergraduates, particularly those from colleges with limited research programs. The program takes additional steps to familiarize the students with what to expect from graduate school and how to assemble a strong application. During the period of this grant the program received about 420 applications per year for 13 positions. Of the eventual participants, 37% were female and 10% were from underrepresented minority groups, which increases these groups' involvement in physics. Most of the participants are now enrolled in graduate programs in physics or related fields, while many others have jobs that rely on their background in science. This development of human capital is the main broader impact of this project. The project also has intellectual merit through the research accomplishments of the students. The timescale for physics research often means that our 10-week summer projects for undergraduates are a single piece in a much broader effort, but each piece is important to the whole. For example, one student studied telescope images of a collision between clusters of galaxies. Since the clusters (and indeed the galaxies themselves) are mostly empty space, many of the galaxies simply move through the opposing cluster, with very little change to their motion. However, a few of the galaxies pass so close to each other that they are strongly affected and begin to move in a new direction. Meanwhile, the galaxies are surrounded by additional gas. This gas is light enough that the collisions has little effect on it. The students's project was to look at the dark matter in the galaxy clusters, an almost invisible component of the universe. The student identified the dark matter through the minor distortions it produced in the images of galaxies. She found that the dark matter motion matched that of the galaxies, not that of the extra gas. Other research will need to analyze other pairs of colliding galaxy clusters to show that this is the normal behavior when clusters collide. In the meantime, the REU student's work supports the idea that dark matter consists of some type of particles, that perhaps can be detected directly by various earthbound experiments now underway. Other research projects examined how isolated atoms move on very clean surfaces, and how to control the motion by varying the temperature and other parameters. This work may eventually have implications for the manufacture of the chips in electronic devices. Yet other projects explored materials with unusual electrical conductance, new ways to detect flu strains, and a computational model that helps in understanding the consequences of Einstein's theory of general relativity. With the students' projects spread throughout many subfields of physics, they included work with high potential for applications as well as work that, for now, has no obvious application but contributes to our understanding of the universe.
