REU Site

We are happy to offer a new Research Opportunities for Undergraduates (REU) Site: Plasma Physics, Plasma Astrophysics, and Fusion at Columbia!

We are happy to announce the first and only REU Site dedicated to plasma physics, astrophysics, and fusion research. This REU Site will bring together the capabilities of both the Applied Physics and Astronomy/Astrophysics departments at Columbia University to provide a compelling intellectual environment and strong cohort experience. The program will begin its first year in the summer of 2025 with an initial cohort of six students mostly drawn from external universities, who will join a cohort of summer students from Columbia University.

Our REU Site will emphasize research in plasma physics applied towards magnetic confinement fusion and plasma astrophysics. We will engage students primarily from physics majors in both experimental and computational roles, as well as astronomy students and also motivated engineering students. These areas are the core competencies of our plasma physics program at Columbia across both Applied Physics and Astrophysics.

Please review the other pages of our website to learn more about the activities in magnetically confined plasmas and fusion research. Please review this webpage to learn more about activities in plasma astrophysics.

Applications for Summer 2025 are CLOSED. The selected cohort can be found on the People page.

Additional Information

  • The program is expected to run from June 2nd through Aug 8th (10 weeks). Unpaid extensions are possible, but without support for accommodations.
  • Participants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents
  • Participants must be enrolled in (but have not yet graduated from) an accredited undergraduate college degree program with a concentration in physics or a related engineering field.
  • Participants must be 18 years of age or older at the time of the program
  • Students interested in research and/or considering an advanced degree, members of under-represented minorities, and students from colleges that lack comparable research are strongly encouraged to apply.
  • While participants from all universities are eligible, this program is targeting students from beyond Columbia University. Current Columbia University students are eligible for other slots and are encouraged to join the lab via our existing application process.
  • The stipend for participation is $700/week, with a 10 week program anticipated.
  • Travel to Columbia: participants will receive up to a $500 travel reimbursement for travel to/from New York City.
  • American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics Meeting: participants will receive up to a $800 travel reimbursement for the 2025 meeting, to be held in Long Beach, CA.
Columbia NYC
  • Accommodations in Columbia Housing are included with participation in the program.
  • Accommodation dates are: Arrive Sunday June 1st, Depart Sat Aug 9th.
  • Accommodations will be a single room in a suite-style residence with a shared kitchen and bathroom space.
  • One set of linens will be provided at the program outset.

Students participating in the program will be eligible for the following additional activities. They are described in the Social page.

  • A weekly student seminar, where graduate students are asked to provide presentations of their research topics or interests in a manner strongly relatable to the undergraduate students.
  • Faculty and external speaker colloquia, in current-day topics of interest.
  • Summer social events, hosted by the department or individual members.
  • National Laboratory tour, of either Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, or Brookhaven National Laboratory.
  • End of Summer Poster Symposium, where students can present their work to their colleagues and other members of the plasma group.

Mentors and Representative Projects

Potential Mentors in this area are:

Representative experimental/hands-on projects in magnetically confined plasmas are described below:

  • A new sub-system has been installed into the Columbia on-campus High-Beta Tokamak experiment. The new system consists of an electromagnetic winding that is energized by the transient voltages present during dynamic plasma events. The currents induced by the dynamic events serve to mitigate the severity of these events themselves - in particular the ability of plasma electrons to be energized to relativistic speeds (MeV energies) by the transient voltages and later strike the confinement chamber. Thus the passive coil system promises to demonstrate passive resiliency to some of the dynamics challenging the exploitation of the tokamak concept. The successful candidate will compare the experimental currents induced in the coil as a function of changes in the plasma geometry and the resistivity of the coil. The student will also develop measurement systems to track the locations of the relativistic electron strikes onto the chamber wall, which produce keV-level hard X-rays (HXR). The location of the HXRs as a function of the plasma and electro-magnet currents will be compared to simulations from plasma fluid codes, and any discrepancies documented. This project will improve the design of next-generation passive electromagnetic windings in magnetic confinement fusion devices.
  • A new experiment has been fielded to measure the ablation of cryogenic ice under bombardment by high energy (<=30 keV) electron beams. Using this technique, the experiment provides a controlled test-bed for the interaction of cryogenic pellets with high temperature plasmas. Cryogenic pellets are essential components of high temperature plasma systems, since they are used to fuel the plasma and to rapidly quench its energy. A validated understanding of the ablation rate will allow development of accurate simulation models that determine where the injected mass will ablate, with application to predicting the overall dynamics of the plasma. The successful candidate will develop measurement and instrumentation techniques to diagnose the magnitude of the experimental ablation rate using multiple measurements - a fast camera system, a microwave cavity system, and an application of the ‘rocket effect’. Measurements will be compared to existing theoretical models, as a function of pellet and electron beam parameters, to improve our understanding of this fundamental plasma process.
  • A new spherical torus plasma experiment, the Columbia University Tokamak for Education (CUTE), is under construction. The goal of the experiment is to provide a testbed for plasma control experiments with a focus on training and education. The successful student will simulate the dynamics of the plasma using our open source Open Fusion Toolkit and compare the experimentally observed plasma dynamics to the simulation. Improvements to the Open Fusion Toolkit model will be made based on the observations, in terms of the material and plasma properties used in the simulation. The plasma measurements will be done with a suite of magnetic pickup sensors, and the experimental data will require some processing to be understood. The Open Fusion Toolkit also provides an interpretation environment to reconstruct the observed plasma equilibria. The student will also have the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing operation and construction of the device in terms of power electronics, data acquisition, and diagnostic development.

Potential Mentors in this area are:

Representative theory and computation projects in magnetically confined plasmas are described below:

  • Magnetically confined plasma fusion systems rely on the confinement of the charged fusion products, the alpha particles, for a sufficiently long time that they can deposit their heat in the hot plasma bulk. One magnetic confinement concept, the stellarator, has historically suffered from poor confinement of these alpha particles. Numerical optimization algorithms have recently demonstrated the ability to obtain stellarator magnetic fields that could be candidates for a fusion energy device. This project focuses on improvements in the numerical integration schemes used for evolving the trajectories of alpha particles in a three-dimensional fusion system, enabling more efficient design and modeling of these devices. The student will perform modification of an existing open-source C++ and python library to improve the accuracy and performance of the integration routines. This will be achieved through application of symplectic algorithms, improved parallelism, and other code optimization techniques. The student should have an interest in high-performance computing and scientific computing.
  • This project will implement the calculation of a new theoretical limit in the size of “3D” distortions an axisymmetric magnetically confined plasmas can withstand before breaking apart. Devices called “tokamaks” are designed to be donut shaped plasma columns that are symmetric going (toroidally) around the donut. Asymmetries as small as one part in 10,000 smaller than the primary magnetic field can drive “reconnection” of field lines that destroys the otherwise good confinement of these toroidal plasmas. Before this, the plasma is simply distorted and maintains concentric surfaces of magnetic flux in which the magnetic field lines lie without crossing the field lines on neighboring surfaces. Maintaining concentric flux surfaces is essential to the ability of the plasma to retain heat and access high temperature conditions for fusion reactions to occur. At some point, the plasma becomes exponentially sensitive to resistivity and the surfaces fall apart due to any small resistivity. This project will be to implement this theoretical threshold calculation in the Generalized Perturbed Equilibrium Code (GPEC), and predict when this might happen for real experimental tokamak plasmas. An analytical theory for determining the limit at has also been recently developed and this will be compared with the simulated thresholds in GPEC. The outcome will enable specifying the tolerable asymmetry.
  • A student would investigate the application of Machine Learning (ML) methods to classify and predict the presence of unwanted plasma instabilities for optimizing the design of magnetically confined plasmas based on the tokamak concept. Avoidance or control of unwanted plasma instabilities is an important design consideration in fusion devices and other engineered plasmas. The “Edge Localized Mode” (ELM) is an example of such an instability, which exists in high-performance tokamak plasmas, and must be avoided in commercial fusion applications. This requires the development of so-called ELM-free regimes that avoid instabilities by carefully regulating energy transport through a variety of approaches. The student would work with their mentor as well as collaborate with Columbia and outside participants of a related SciDAC project investigating this work. They would learn about and apply ML techniques for classification and prediction, including generative approaches similar to those in ChatGPT and other state-of-the-art methods in the ML/AI field. Models will be trained using experimental and high-fidelity simulation, providing an opportunity to learn about a breadth of the methods and their application in plasma physics. Finally, they will attend and participate in subject and plenary meeting for the collaboration, providing additional opportunities to build communication and collaboration skills.

Potential Mentors in this area are:

In the area of plasma astrophysics, some typical projects are described below.

  • Magnetic fields on the Sun are measured by making use of the Zeeman effect. The resulting maps of the solar photospheric magnetic field are known as magnetograms. The Zeeman effect refers to the shifts in the energies of atomic energy levels when the atoms are in a magnetic field. These shifts in energy cause lines in the spectrum to split compared to when there is no magnetic field. Additionally, light emitted from the split sub-levels is polarized differently depending on the orientation of the observer to the magnetic field. Most magnetograms are based on polarimetric measurements. But such measurements are slow because the Sun must be imaged using optical filters for four polarization states. The successful applicant will test a method for measuring photospheric magnetic fields relying only on the spectroscopic Zeeman splitting and compare those results to conventional polarimetric measurements to assess the level of agreement.
  • The Sun emits a continuous stream of charged particles into space known as the solar wind. The characteristics of the solar wind are measured by satellites near the Earth and those properties vary significantly. For example the wind may be fast or slow or it may contain many or few Alfven plasma waves. One hypothesis is that the solar wind starts off with the same amount of plasma wave energy everywhere, but the Alfven waves are damped more quickly in some solar wind compared to others, and this may also affect other properties such as the wind speed. The successful applicant will study solar wind satellite data to test this hypothesis by measuring the correlations between characteristics of Alfven waves and other properties of the solar wind.
  • A variety of plasma waves can be found in the solar corona. Alfven waves are transverse waves in which the magnetic field and the plasma move together. These waves are thought to play an important role in coronal heating by carrying wave energy from lower layers of the Sun into the corona. The corona also supports acoustic waves. Although the acoustic waves carry little energy themselves, they may act as a catalyst for heating the corona by driving reflection and damping the Alfven waves. Acoustic waves can be measured in images of the Sun as intensity fluctuations over time, as the intensity is proportional to the square of the plasma density. The successful applicant will study images of the corona and measure the amplitudes, frequencies, and wavelengths of acoustic waves throughout the solar corona. These data will be used as inputs to a theoretical model to understand how the acoustic waves affect the Alfven waves.

Apply Now!

Applications For Summer 2025 are now OPEN.

Please use this link to fill out your application:

https://forms.gle/gZJ7RFkbFXKoNZd6A

We will request reference letters, your letter writer should upload their letter at this link

https://forms.gle/DtWtVbNcD8AMQEXWA

Applications are DUE January 31st 2025

  • Participants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents
  • Participants must be enrolled in (but have not yet graduated from) an accredited undergraduate college degree program with a concentration in physics or a related engineering field.
  • Participants must be 18 years of age or older at the time of the program

We will collect the following information as part of the application:

  • Basic name, educational institution, and demographic information
  • A personal statement** (2 page max)
  • An unofficial transcript (and your GPA)
  • A Curriculum Vitae (2 page max)
  • A reference letter (submitted separately)

**You will be requested to provide a personal statement. While this statement can take any format you prefer, you are encouraged to address the following questions in your statement:

  1. What are your career plans after your undergraduate / masters degree?
  2. What past experience has best prepared you for our REU program?
  3. What are your goals for your time in our REU program? Why do you want to work here? Is there a particular activity that interests you?
  4. Our group does a mix of computer-based data analysis and modeling, and hands-on projects. Do you have a preference, which, and why?

If you have any remaining questions, you can email [email protected]