REU Projects

Students will have the chance to work together with the world’s leading scientists at CERN for nine weeks of individually mentored research activities. They are involved in real scientific studies and help solve the real problems facing scientists at CERN. Mentors are chosen from among the CERN-based U.S. scientific community as well as scientists from other participating nations. Students see firsthand how research problems are attacked and what must be done to validate solutions. CERN has been a major training ground for several generations of great scientists and engineers.

Students’ projects will be assigned by CERN and us. Projects and mentors for all students are assigned based on their previous experience and research interests. We arrange meetings with each student to discuss about their interests and projects one or two weeks after they arrive CERN to make sure that they are happy with the projects they are assigned.

For the first few weeks, our students spend 100% of their time on research projects. In the remaining week, they spend 50% on research and the other 50% on the CERN lecture series. We organize and require all students to make three project presentations to their peers and mentors during their stay. The last presentation acts as a summary of their research project and is recorded on video. This presentation will provide the student with an important sense of accomplishment, proof of having made a significant contribution to CERN’s scientific program. The videos are available on the CERN indico website.

The project titles for 2013 are listed below:

· Optimizing the W resonance in dijet mass (Daniel Abercrombie, Penn State University)

· Chromaticity shift induced by misalignment of Landau Octupole magnets (Neal Anderson, University of Michigan)

· Material distribution study of the inner tracker upgrade (William Burrus, NC A&T)

· Offline noise payload analysis for CMS silicon strip tracker (Jonathan Clark, Texas Tech University)

· H->µµ and Z+jets MC optimization (Rachael Creager, University of Notre Dame)

· Vertex identification optimization in the Hàgg decay channel (Julia Gonski, Rutgers University)

· Sextupolar magnets in CLIC (Rebecca Glaudell, University of Illinois)

· Analysis of MC simulations of background events for high luminosity upgrade (Christopher Hayes, Austin Peay State University)

· Multivariate techniques for MET analyses (Theodor Christian Herwig, University of Chicago)

· Simulating the beam line at ISOLDE (Casey McGrath, University of Redlands)

· Estimating the fake lepton background in a search for pair produced stops at CMS (David Kolchmeyer, Rutgers University)

· Incorporating data visualization into ZENODO (Kevin Sanders, High Point University)

· Search for new physics using forward-backward asymmetry in the dilepton channel (Aaron Vermeersch, Michigan State University)

These projects show the wide range of projects available to students. Projects range from high energy physics, to accelerator, to detector development, to computer science projects.