This award supports the renewal of the Stony Brook Research Experience for Undergraduates in Physics program which brings undergraduate students to the Stony Brook campus each summer for participation in an eight-week program of forefront research in the laboratories of Stony Brook physics and astronomy faculty members. The program offers research opportunities in the areas of astronomy and planetary sciences, atmospheric physics, high-energy particle physics, instructional laboratory instrumentation, lasers and optics, nuclear physics and solid-state/condensed matter physics. Most projects are experimental but a few are theoretical. The immediate aim of the program is to provide training in, encourage interest in, and appreciation of, scientific research in physics and to facilitate career planning by the actual doing of research in a collegial setting, by site visits to research laboratories at Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory, by weekly seminars on current topics in physics and astronomy, and finally by presentations of student research results in a formal symposium and a written report at the conclusion of the program. Outstanding projects are submitted for presentation at other student research symposia.
The program provided students with an intensive research experience, aunder the supervision of leading researchers in the field. Research topics included Accelerator Science, Astronomy (observational & theoretical), Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics, Computational Physics & Astrophysics, Condensed Matter Physics, Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics and the Laser Teaching Center. The REU participants were assigned to a faculty mentor and became fully integrated into active research groups using state-of-the-art facilities. Participants had the opportunity to work closely with their faculty mentor, attend weekly seminars, participate in workshops and present their research results at a student symposium at the close of the program. In the three years of the program and in the one year of no-cost extension 40 students was fully or partially supported by the REU grant. REU students co-authored 9 publications in peer reviewed international journals. Each year the REU symposium resulted in a collection of abstracts that has been published on the Internet. Many graduates of the program continued physics, astronomy or related studies as graduate students, including students in the Ph.D. program at UCLA (2009 class), Stanford University, the University of Connecticut and Columbia University (2010 class) and at UC Santa Barbara and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2011 class).
