Undergraduate Research Opportunities
Research Opportunities
All of our faculty are involved in research, and many offer opportunities for undergraduates to become involved. Students can earn academic credit for their research with PHY 395 or AST 395, or they may be paid for their work.Some current opportunities are listed here, or talk to any another faculty member whose research seems interesting to you. You can learn more about on-going research in the Physics Department here.
Professor Suketu BhavsarPattern recognition in the Universe: Quantifying the Underlying Structure:
My research involves developing and using techniques to identify filamentary structure in the universe in an objective and repeatable way. Supplementing this by clever statistical (NOT error analysis, which is what most people associate statistics with!) methods to assess their significance.
A short project to "learn the ropes" would be to apply these techniques to the night sky consisting of the bright stars. Are the visual constellations recognized picked out? What is their significance?
Depending on the expertise developed and the time available a longer project could be assigned. This would involve comparing the filamentary structure in red-shift maps of the large scale structure in the universe with N-body simulations of galaxy clustering. The aim is to put constraints on the basic parameters that describe our universe.
1) Electro-Optic Measurements in an Infrared Microscope
We are interfacing an infrared microscope with tunable IR lasers to study electric field induced changes in optical properties of charge-density-wave materials. In particular, while changes in transmission have previously been observed, the use of the microscope will allow us to search for reflectance changes as well as to study the spatial and spectral dependence of the transmission of very small crystals. This experimental work will be done in collaboration with a senior graduate student.2) Measuring specific heat under pressure
Specific heat measurements are among the most important ways of characterizing solid state phase transitions. Many oxide and organic conductors exhibit a number of strongly pressure dependent phases. Unfortunately, the available crystals of these are usually very small and their heat capacities are typically much smaller than that of the pressure medium, making measurements of heat capacity under pressure very difficult. We are experimenting with a technique that may allow us to avoid this complication. A student working on this project will work in collaboration with a postdoc in our group; depending on the interests of the student, this project can also include an analytic and computational component.
Investigations of Delbruck Scattering
I am looking for an undergraduate student who is interested in working on a scientific programming project. The emphasis here is more on the science than the programming.
The goal is to determine whether or not a certain type of nuclear physics experiment, namely the measurement of the Delbruck scattering cross section, is feasible. Delbruck scattering involves the elastic scattering of photons off of a nucleus. In this case I am thinking of photons in the MeV energy range, but we may also look in the few GeV range as well. This is of interest in quantum electrodynamics (it's related to vacuum polarization), and it is important in the interpretation of a large number of photon scattering experiments. I have a suspicion that this also has implications in astrophysics, but this is something we need to explore.
The project involves:
The student should have a knowledge of modern physics (particularly relativistic mechanics), and be able to program in some language I know (C++ or FORTRAN).
- A literature search. Find out what is known experimentally and theoretically about Delbruck scattering.
- A calculation of the rates for Delbruck scattering based on what is known from the literature. Optimize the parameters (target thickness, target composition, detector geometry, beam parameters, etc.) of a potential experiment.
- Calculate background processes (namely Compton scattering).
- Document what has been done in a short paper.
I could use two students (any time) to work in my lab. I will have the following topics:
a) Systematic studies of water NMR. I would like the extract the spin relaxation time T1 of protons in water at low magnetic fields. The student will take data by him/herself and also analyse these data.
b) Comparing EPR (Electron Paramagnetic Resonance) with NMR on a polarized helium-3 target. Again lots of data taking and analysis.
There even might be a small chance that I will need a student who is willing to go to JLab for a few weeks this summer, but that's not certain yet.
I. Simulation problem
There are many problems in physics that can't be solved analytically, but for which the equations of motion can be used to produce a computer model of the system. The resulting study is halfway between theory and experiment, because there are errors and uncertainties to the data, and the computer usually studies a simplified model.
I always have a few such problems that need someone to help write the programs and collect the data. Knowledge of FORTRAN and the UNIX operating system are not required but would be useful.
II. Demonstration physicsThis project involves designing and constructing apparatus for use in demonstration lectures or public displays. It requires a variety of skills, such as carpentry or electronics, as well as an understanding of the phenomena involved. They give the student a real opportunity to put physics to work.
Last modified 1/05 by A. Shapere.
