REU Site: Undergraduate Research in Nuclear and Particle Physics at TUNL and Duke University

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports the renewal of the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in Physics at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) and Duke University. TUNL is a research consortium consisting of three major universities in the North Carolina Triangle Area, Duke University, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The program will provide opportunities for a total of 12 students to participate in research on a broad range of topics in nuclear and particle physics. Eight students will conduct research at TUNL, and the other four will spend part of their summer at CERN working with the Duke high-energy physics group. This REU summer program provides undergraduate students with an active research experience through the completion of a self-contained 10-week project. Each student is assigned a faculty mentor and is integrated into a research group consisting of faculty, postdocs, graduate students and other undergraduate students. In addition, the students have opportunities to learn about the graduate programs at the consortium institutions. Through active research, seminars, lab tours, and discussion groups, the students are exposed to various aspects of nuclear and particle physics research and their connections to other science areas. Lecture and seminar topics are chosen to emphasize the nuclear and particle physics research activities at TUNL and CERN, respectively. Both student groups will have opportunities to work with state-of-the-art technologies used in these lines of research.