Undergraduate Research in Nuclear Physics
at TUNL - Program Summary - Summers of 2003-2005
1. Introduction
The Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) has successfully completed six summer sessions of Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in nuclear physics. This is a summary of the program activities funded by National Science Foundation (grant no NSF-PHY-02-43776) during the summers of 2003-2005. Students participating in the TUNL program performed research with faculty and postdoctoral researchers in the TUNL collaboration, which includes Duke University (Duke), North Carolina State University (NCSU), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and other institutions in the central North Carolina area. We continue to see growth in the applicant pool, which improves our ability to include outstanding students from small schools that have few local research opportunities. Below, we provide an overview of biographical information for the participants.
Year / Applicants(total/female) / Offers
(tot./fem.) / Participants
(tot./fem.) / Rising Juniors / Physics Ph.D. Granting
Home Institution
2003 / 67/16 / 20/8 / 9/2 / 4 / 4
2004 / 73/21 / 20/8 / 8/2 / 4 / 1
2005 / 86/22 / 24/11 / 9/4 / 6 / 2
Each year eight students were funded by the NSF.
2. Scope of Activities
2.1 Student Research Projects
A variety of research projects have been available to the REU students at TUNL. The projects involved construction of apparatus, target preparation, development of detector arrays, data analysis, etc. See Appendix A for a summary of the student projects.
In most cases the projects involved two research advisors to ensure that the students could easily seek guidance or advice from one of their advisors. We prefer to have a junior and senior advisor, which improves the likelihood that students will ask for help when they don't understand a concept.
In making project assignments, the students were matched with research projects by balancing the student's interest with any special skills or experience that would help to promote a successful project. To assist in this process, the students provided input by reviewing a list of project descriptions, which included a paragraph of physics motivation and expected student research activities. The students rank their interest in each of the projects on a scale from 1-5, and we use this information to give us guidance in making project assignments.
Students often worked independently on a piece of a greater project with guidance from advisors or other group members, and in many cases the students participated in week-long data-collection runs by taking shifts with other members in their group. In all cases, at the end of the summer the students had gained an understanding of the research activities within their groups and demonstrated a positive contribution to their research project.
2.2 Written and Oral Presentations.
Because the research process involves aspects of planning, investigation and reporting, we have incorporated these activities into the REU program. Throughout the summer, the students were encouraged to discuss their projects with other REU students and with other TUNL researchers. The students gave formal descriptions of their research, first in week three by orally describing their research group and project objectives to other REU students, and then in week seven by preparing a three-transparency overview of their progress. This approach was intended both, to encourage the students to think about how to describe their research to their peers and to encourage physics discussion amongst the students. During the final week of the summer program, students presented their research to the TUNL laboratory community in a 10-minute talk that followed the American Physical Society (APS) contributed talk format. In most cases, there was an interesting dialog of questions and answers between the students and research staff that demonstrated the progress and understanding of the students. The students were also required to summarize their research in a written report that was given to their faculty advisor and the program director.
In each of the three years of this grant, we were pleased that several of our REU students participated in the APS Division of Nuclear Physics Conference, by participating in the NSF sponsored Conference Experience for Undergraduates (CEU) poster sessions at the Division of Nuclear Physics meetings in Tucson, Chicago and Maui.
2.3 Lectures and Seminars
In the first week of the programs, the students were instructed in standard laboratory operation and safety procedures. After this training, they are given free access throughout the nuclear facility. In the third year of this grant, we added a set of educational lectures in the first two weeks that covered basic concepts to introduce the students to various topics in nuclear physics. Student response to these lectures was positive, in spite of the formal classroom setting, and we plan to continue this form of training in future years. An overview of lecture topics is given below.
· Interaction of Radiation with Matter
· NN interactions and Nucleon Constituents
· Introduction to Nuclear Electronics
· Nuclear Structure and Shell Model
· Nuclear Reaction Phenomenology
Throughout the summers, the students attended the "TUNL Advances in Physics" seminar series, where local faculty and postdoctoral researches gave general descriptions of their ongoing activities. This seminar series gives the students a view of the different areas of nuclear physics research pursued at TUNL. Over the three year award period, the weekly seminars included overviews of research related to:
· Nuclear Astrophysics and Cross Section Modeling
· Photonuclear Physics and the High Intensity Gamma-ray Source at TUNL
· Polarized Ion Sources
· Experimental Studies in Few-Body physics at TUNL
· Polarized 3He Technology and Measurements at HIGS
· Neutrino Physics and KamLAND
· Fundamental Physics with Neutrons and Cold Neutrons
· Simulating Supernovae with Supercomputers
In addition to the formal "Advances in Physics" seminar series, graduate students met with the REU students every-other week at the TUNL Informal Lunch Talks (TILT). TILT is a student organized meeting time, where graduate students present their research and have discussion about various aspects of student life at Duke, UNC-CH and NCSU. These lunchtime meetings are intended to promote REU/graduate student interaction in a more casual and open environment.
2.4 Group training activities.
Each year, the students took part in group training exercises where they interpreted observations from senior level physics project experiments. The students would spend a day of setup and a day of data-taking to perform an experiment that demonstrated basic nuclear physics laboratory techniques and interpretation to deduce nuclear structure properties. Each year the students measured (n, n) elastic and inelastic scattering by detecting both neutrons and gamma-rays. In the first year the students measured 12C(n, n) reactions, in the second and third years they measured the spectroscopy of nuclear levels in 28Si, 32S targets.
Student comments have been very positive toward the REU group experiment. The activity is scheduled in the first two weeks to help involve the students in common tasks that are a part of accelerator based nuclear physics measurements. While performing the experiments, the students were divided into sub-groups that were each assigned tasks that included preparing detectors, tuning beam, and analyzing data. The activity gave the students the opportunity to experience all aspects of planning for and running a complex experiment. We place a high emphasis on this group activity and have reacted to the comments from students to make improvements in subsequent years. In the first year, the measurements on 12C provided useful training and introduction to the laboratory, but the spectroscopy of 12C was too simple and didn’t give much data for the students to evaluate. In the second year we chose targets with rich nuclear level information and assigned the task of identifying the target materials to the students, but the task of identifying the targets simply from their spectroscopy was too difficult and absorbed more of the student effort than was our intention. Groups using high-resolution HPGe detectors were able to easily identify the samples, while other groups using NaI detectors and liquid scintillator (TOF) detectors were unable to unambiguously identify the target materials.
Our present approach to this experiment is to use fairly complicated targets whose composition is known to the students, such as Si and S; many levels are populated and the de-excitations are both direct and sequential. This gives the students the students a challenging project that they can fully understand in a couple of days. The students compare their observations with compiled level structure data and can then make comments about preference for populating levels based on spin values, and branching ratios for gamma-decay.
After completing the experiment each sub-group gave an oral presentation which explained the physical processes at work in their particular detector and the analysis that was performed to characterize their samples. The students not only discovered that nuclear spectroscopy is a powerful tool for identifying the composition of materials, but they also learned the importance of teamwork in the processes of carrying out experimental research, organizing results and explaining results to their peers. This exercise was presented at the Conference on the Application of Accelerators in Research and Industry CAARI 2004 in Forth Worth, Texas by a post-doctoral researcher, Alex Crowell, in a poster titled "Experiments to Introduce Students in the TUNL REU Program to Nuclear Spectroscopy Techniques".
2.5 Department Tours
The students are always eager to hear advice and input about physics programs and the graduate school application process. Since the Triangle Universities Nuclear Lab involves three well-known university campuses we attempt to arrange visits to each campus so that the REU’s are exposed to the character of each of the different physics departments, and so they become familiar with the different areas of emphasis for research.
Each year, the Physics Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hosted the REU students for a half-day tour of their department. The students were given an overview of ongoing research within the department, and were then given a tour of several research laboratories. The visit to UNC was typically scheduled around July 4th, which gave us an opportunity to return to TUNL and celebrate with our annual Ice Cream Social. This UNC department visit is growing to include students participating in the UNC-Pembroke REU program.
We have visited the North Carolina State University campus and physics department. Faculty members at NCSU have given overviews of the physics department activities and have volunteered to give tours of their physics laboratories on the main NCSU campus as well as laboratories on the Centennial Campus, which was created to simplify partnerships between industry and academia. The Duke University Physics Department has also begun to host a student information day, where a group of professors give a brief overview of their research and graduate students show posters describing their research.
2.6 Social Activities
Activities were planned throughout the summers to promote interaction amongst the REU students and the TUNL community. A traditional event is a visit to the Durham Bulls ballpark on Memorial Day. The scheduling of the REU program at Duke always places the first day of the program on the day after Memorial Day; we have always taken the holiday as a chance to have a social event, such as a ballgame, that helps the students get to know each other. In 2005, the Bulls were out of town, so the first event was a visit to the Durham Museum of Life and Science.
On their first full day in the laboratory, the students take care of much of their paper work; they meet their faculty advisors, and then end the day by meeting the laboratory staff at a welcome reception. Other activities ranged from a "Carolina Barbeque" picnic that was open to all of the students and their research advisors to smaller picnics held by the individual research groups. In addition we typically celebrate one of the hottest days of summer by holding an all-lab Ice Cream Social, and by making homemade ice cream using heavy cream, fresh fruits and liquid nitrogen. At the end of summer, as is traditional, we said farewell to all of the visiting scientists, including the REU students, with our annual pig-picking event.
Activities that introduced the REU students to various attractions in the area included a trips to Virginia International Raceway in Danville VA, Durham Museum of Life and Science, the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, the Duke University Primate Center, Regency Park in Raleigh to hear the North Carolina Symphony and to see 4th of July fireworks, camping trips to the NC outer banks and along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
3. Program Evaluation
3.1 Student progress
Each week, the students met with the program director to discuss any issues that had arisen. Normally these meetings were brief, lasting for only ten-to-fifteen minutes. It was during this period that students began to develop an approach for explaining their research projects; first the students gave a short informal oral introduction of their project to the other REU students. Later in the summer they gave a three-transparency overview to the other students. Based on these presentations it was possible to evaluate the understanding that the students had gained, and the progress and role of the students in the research activities. In some cases it was evident from the presentations that the students needed supportive comments that encouraged them to play a more responsible role in their research group.
3.2 Student Feedback
At the end of the summer program, the students were given a comprehensive evaluation form to provide feedback about their TUNL REU experience. The form contains simple yes/no questions, questions that ask them to check all that apply, and also more general questions asking them to explain their opinions or give us advice that will improve future REU experiences.
Overall, the students appeared to have been well placed in the different research groups. Each year, the students overwhelmingly described their research by selected descriptors like "interesting", "educational" and "worthwhile".
The students followed up with comments like "It was an extremely worthwhile experience and I'm glad that I participated in it. I would definitely do another REU. I met a lot of great people and I learned more than I had expected.", "Educational experience. I learned a lot about lab work that you don't get exposed to as an undergraduate. Some of it is fun and interesting. Some of it is tedious but necessary.", and " Packed with information and busy, but fun and interesting at the same time."