REU Site: Optics in the City of Light

This award supports the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site in Physics hosted by the University of Michigan but is primarily conducted in laboratories in and around Paris, France. This international REU site, Optics in the City of Light, will bring eight undergraduates to Paris each summer to conduct research at three primary Parisian research institutions: the University of Paris-Sacley, Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Nationale de Techniques Avancées. (ENSTA). The University of Paris-Saclay was recently created and has combined 14 universities including: the Institut d'Optique Graduate School, Université Paris-Sud 11 (Orsay), and Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan that have been long time participants in the program. Students will be additionally mentored by a faculty member at the Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science (GM-CUOS) at Michigan. The students will spend one week in Ann Arbor, followed by two months in Paris. Each student will keep weekly on-line research diaries to aid in communication with each full group. A GM-CUOS faculty member or research scientist will accompany the students to Paris and stay for one week to ensure that the students get a good start. The students will be housed in a local hotel in Ann Arbor and at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. The research that will be conducted will be cutting edge programs at the French institutions and may even include some collaborative work with GM_CUOS and the new high power ultrafast laser Zeus, an NSF user facility at Michigan. The research in all projects will all involve the use of optics with a focus on ultrafast lasers to discover very current, state-of-the art phenomena in a wide range of fields including relativistic optics, plasma physics, materials spectroscopy, nano-machining, patterned biological cell templating, nano-photonics, high power fiber lasers, plasma x-ray sources, dynamics of nano-magnetic materials, terahertz imaging, biomedical imaging with shaped pulses, and the fatigue life studies of materials, as well as other topics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.