LIGO Livingston Observatory News
Summer Visitors at LLO
- Contributed by Mark Coles
This is the fourth year that the LIGO Livingston Observatory
(LLO) has had a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program.
This program makes it possible for students to undertake
independent research projects at LLO under the mentorship of
LLO staff. Each year, as our staff has grown and the interferometer
has progressed from installation into commissioning and operation,
the number of student participants has also grown. At the same time,
students participating in the MIT
Research
program have also been hosted by LLO the last
two summers, as have students participating in research at other
LIGO Scientific Collaboration member institutions. This year
the students are conducting investigations in a very broad range
of areas. Examples include: mapping the modes of oscillation of
the suspended test masses to find "sweet spots" for beam alignment;
measurement of the optical absorption properties of sapphire;
measurement of seismic motion with an eighteen element seismometer
array to estimate the seismically induced gravity gradient noise;
measurement of lock acquisition velocities of suspended test masses;
and detailed measurements of optics motion that will lead to
refinements of the end-to-end model of the interferometer.
This year we have seventeen undergraduate and graduate students participating in research at LLO.
Left - Michael Baham, an undergraduate at Southern University of Baton Rouge.
Right - Robert Berry, an undergraduate at Utah State University, Logan, Utah.
Left - Caryn Bullard, an undergraduate at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Right - Amber Bullington, a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California.
Above - Dan Busby, a graduate student at Caltech, Pasadena, California.
Left - Ivan Christov, an undergraduate at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Right - Raghuveer Dodda, an undergraduate at Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, Louisiana.
Left - Michael Hu, an undergraduate student at Caltech, Pasadena, California.
Right - Robert Johnston, a graduate student at the University of Texas, Brownsville, Texas.
Left - George Noid, an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee.
Right - Tina Perez, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, Brownsville, Texas.
Left - Edrick Preddie, an undergraduate student at Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Right - William Quarles, an undergraduate student at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Left - Andrew Weber, an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
Right - Mark Sauerwein, a graduate student at LSU, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Left - Jennifer Tu, an undergraduate at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Right - Eric Villarino, an undergraduate at University of Texas, Brownsville, Texas.
The students are housed at
Southeastern Louisiana University.
We are very grateful to the administration for making the
Southeastern Oaks student housing complex available to our
students for the fourth consecutive year. This makes it possible
for the students to live in a campus environment with access to
gymnasium, pool, library, and the social life available in and
around a major college campus. See
this web-page by Robert Johnston
(a student participant from UT Brownsville) for a nice commentary on
housing, the surrounding environment, and description of the work
environment from a student perspective.
Not far from LLO there are many fascinating places to visit. Above, a scene during a tour of Honey Island swamp.
While each of the students has the opportunity for one-on-one
interaction with a mentor, we have also organized an extensive
series of summer lectures covering the physics of LIGO, astrophysical
sources of gravity waves, and technical topics associated with the
design, commissioning, and operation of LIGO. This year we have also
scheduled two field trips in association with these lectures: to the
2 GeV synchrotron light source at LSU, which is used to characterize
the impurities in sapphire test samples that may be used to form the
optics of an upgraded LIGO interferometer; and to the
ALLEGRO resonant bar gravity wave detector on campus in Nicholls Hall at LSU.
You can view the schedule and lecture notes for this summer at
http://www.ligo-la.caltech.edu/surflect2002.php.
This year we also have three high school teachers participating
in our Research Experiences for Teachers program. Each teacher
has the opportunity to participate in the research activities of
LIGO, working in the control room, assisting with the installation
and commissioning of apparatus, and interacting with the LIGO staff
in other ways to become knowledgeable about the LIGO program. They
can then use this experience to enrich their classroom teaching in
the fall. This has also resulted in the development of new curriculum
materials, developed by the teachers
that are posted here. These
materials are enrichment activities that reinforce Louisiana State
Science benchmarks, which are derived from the National Academy of
Sciences benchmarks. The teachers have also constructed hands-on
demonstrations that can be used by student visitors to LLO to reinforce
concepts relating to LIGO.
Clockwise from upper left: Larry Blanchard of the New
Orleans Public Schools, Donna Harrisson of the East Baton Rouge
Parish Public School System, and John Thacker of the St. Tammany
Parish Public Schools.
We would also like to thank Sarah Berry, wife of SURF
Fellow Robert Berry and an undergraduate at Utah State
University, for her excellent assistance with administrative
work in the front office this summer.
A welcoming party for the LLO summer visitors was
held June 22 to give everyone an informal opportunity
to become acquainted and to experience great Louisiana cuisine.
A few snapshots are given below.
Students interested in participating in the 2003 SURF program should look at
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LIGO_web/students/undergrads.html
where the details of next year's program will be posted this coming January.
Teachers interested in participating in next summer's RET program should contact
Mark Coles at coles_m@ligo-la.caltech.edu.
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