This award supports the renewal of the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and Research Experience for Teachers (RET) site at the University of Oklahoma Norman Campus. The award will support ten undergraduates and two teachers per year in research projects including opportunities in astrophysics, condensed matter, atomic and molecular physics or high energy physics. The primary goal of the site is to bridge the gap from student to scientist. This is done through substantive, consequential research mentored daily by a faculty member in an area in which the student or teacher is interested. In addition, there will be a semiweekly seminar series covering the language of quantum mechanics, career options in each of four disciplines of physics, and career development. The final seminars will be given by the students themselves presenting their own work. In addition, the site offers a series of voluntary courses, field trips and seminars that expose the students to real research tools. Teachers will participate in the seminar series, research, and develop classroom-ready research-grade experiments.
, provided funds to run the University of Oklahoma REU program for three years and to pay the stipends and expenses of 23 students over three years with an additional 13 students funded by OU and an additional 15 students funded through existing grants. Hence NSF support of the fundamental REU infrastructure allowed us provide a research opportunity for 51 students. Over the summer, students met twice weekly for lunch seminars. They included introduction to research, presentations by faculty on the different subfields of physics and why they pursued their career, advice on applying to graduate schools, a seminar on giving scientific talks, and research presentations by the students on their own work. Seminars were offered and given on a wide variety of computer topics, including Mathematica, LabVIEW, LaTeX, unix, Fortran, and C. Over the past three years, students from our REU program contributed to six publications in peer-reviewed journals with three additional publications submitted, ten presentations at regional or national conferences, and two local presentations. The award also funded two teachers for three years as part of the RET program (an additional teacher was funded the first year). In 2011, the teachers worked with Quarknet/Fermilab on cosmic ray detectors. We acquired two cosmic ray detectors and the teachers tested and calibrated the detectors. While the intention of the Quarknet project is to disseminate detectors to places like high schools, the documentation was often not at the level appropriate for teachers. Thus, among the useful products from the summer was a Quick Start Guide usable for other teachers. The guide was submitted and accepted by the Quarknet collaboration to be used by teachers working with the cosmic ray detectors. In 2012-2013 the teachers worked on an experiment to observe slow light and electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in an atomic vapor. They built an atomic vapor cell holder than minimizes magnetic fields sufficiently to see EIT. They learned and performed an EIT experiment and results are shown in the figure. The experiment was performed in a different apparatus to learn technique. In the future, this knowledge will be used to create a stand-alone system that can be used to demonstrate EIT in the classroom. The figure shows EIT data taken by the RET particpants.
