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On Target (October 1996) | ||||
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"REAL WORLD" LEARNINGSummer students gain valuable insightTwenty-two year old Ricardo Walker stares at the thin, laminated mylar and kevlar window as it bubbles - stretching and pulling as water presses in from behind. The Virginia Union University senior wants to see how much pressure the window can take before it bursts. The project is part of his participation in COUPR, a Jefferson Lab summer program for promising undergraduate physics students.Walker's experiment, "Vacuum Window Material Testing," helps ensure that the Laboratory's accelerator beam will safely pass through the windows of Hall C's High Momentum Spectrometer (HMS) and the Short-Orbit Spectrometer. The large HMS vacuum window must hold nine tons of atmospheric pressure when operational, and yet it is only 0.015 of an inch thick. "The window has to be thin enough for the beam to pass through and strong enough to hold vacuum," says Walker. "Splash!" The window bursts open with water erupting to the floor. Walker analyzes the results and repeats the process 20 times before reporting his findings to his mentor, a Hall C physicist. Walker is one of several new faces on the Jefferson Lab campus this
summer. In June, 32 undergraduate and graduate physics students from 18
colleges across the country and five world-wide, participated in at least
one of three annual summer programs. Walker is one of six students in
COUPR, which stands for CEBAF Outstanding Undergraduate Physics
Researchship. The program, now in its second year, offers promising physics
students real-world experience in a laboratory setting - an opportunity
usually reserved for graduate students.
Other summer students attend the laboratory's graduate programs - the 11th Annual Hampton University Graduate Studies (HUGS) and the SURA/Jefferson Lab Graduate Fellowship program. HUGS is a three-week school where graduate students attend daily lectures, interact with leading experimental and theoretical physicists, and publish a scientific paper in the HUGS at Jefferson Lab Proceedings. "HUGS gives you a lot of ideas in preparing your Ph.D. thesis because of the different lecture topics," said Ho Meoyng Choi. One of last year's HUGS lectures, "Light-Cone Quantum Chromodynamics," is the subject of Choi's fellowship and Ph.D. thesis research. Choi's participation in HUGS last year resulted in his acceptance as a graduate research assistant in the Theory Group. Fellows from SURA member institutions can conduct research at their home institutions to enhance their coursework, or like Choi, receive summer positions at Jefferson Lab. The aim of the SURA/Jefferson Lab Fellowship program is to give outstanding students the opportunity to strengthen their research capabilities and further assist SURA member institutions in expanding graduate training in nuclear physics, accelerator physics, and related fields. "The purpose of our summer programs is to introduce young people to the exciting science at Jefferson Lab," says Dr. Nathan Isgur, Director of University Relations. "The expectation is that some of the brightest minds will pursue careers that will lead them to a job here or to a university research position where they use our facilities." Tarsha Leherr, Director's Office Administrator
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