Support for the "Table Top Experiments with Skyscraper Reach" Workshop

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award will provide support for the "Table Top Experiments with Skyscraper Reach" workshop. It will be held August 9-11, 2017 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. The primary intellectual merit of the conference is in its potential to catalyze collaboration across diverse physics fields. This conference is aligned with NSF interests in developing a diverse workforce. On-campus experiments will give under-represented minorities (URMs) and women who are undergraduates hands-on detector experience. These experiments usually have small numbers of collaboration members, hence workshops such as this are particularly important for broadly disseminating the plans for such experiments and recruiting new collaborators. The funding to attend the conference is targeted at junior scientists and the organizers will aim for gender equity and will recruit URMs as participants. This award provides funds to support travel for attendees to a workshop that will bring together scientists to discuss about 20 new experiments that can be performed with under 20 collaborators and modest funding. Such experiments span a range of techniques from nuclear, particle, and atomic physics, and represent a variety of programs within the NSF physics division. By bringing together experts promoting a unique collection of research programs, using a wide variety of experimental techniques, it is hoped to form a community where ideas can be exchanged and collaborations can be formed.