This award supports an international Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site which will bring 8 undergraduates to Paris each summer to conduct collaborative researc with faculty at the University of Michigan's Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences (CUOS) and several Parisian research institutions: 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 put into 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 9 weeks in Paris. Each student will keep weekly on-line research diaries to aid in communication. The research in all projects will 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, 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, and similar projects. The site is co-funded by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.
