DESY Summer Students 2019 at DESY in Hamburg.
Education and training of young students in the field of research with synchrotron radiation is an important issue at DESY Photon Science. One part of this effort is the annual summer student programme which has been established in 2003 in addition to the programme dedicated to accelerator science already in place at DESY. The aim of all undergraduate programmes is to introduce students into working at a facility like PETRA III or FLASH, to provide insight into the outstanding experimental possibilities of such a facility, and to attract the next generation of outstanding scientists to the field.
The programme has been running for more than the last ten years for eight weeks each summer. Since 2006 students can stay in the DESY guest houses. DESY also pays for travel and subsistence expenses.
Usually the students work on a small own project within one of the research groups while attending a lecture course throughout their whole stay, which introduces them to the various fields of research conducted at DESY. A course is dedicated to research with photons/synchrotron radiation at DESY, although part of the lecture course is relevant to all students and is shared between the high energy physics and synchrotron radiation groups.
The course starts with a week of common lectures introducing the basics of accelerator physics and other topics of interest to all students. After that, experts in the various fields concerning research with synchrotron radiation hold lectures for the DESY Photon Science students specifically twice a week. Also the common lecture course continues at a rate of one lecture per week.
Most students’ projects in the various research groups involve practical experiments. On top of that a week of experimentation at adedicated beamline is generally organized for the students, where they conduct a whole experiment by themselves from start to finish in small groups. In a concluding symposium, selected students then present their work in a short talk, and the quality of the program is then discussed with the aid of an anonymous questionnaire to ensure the summer student program is continually improved to provide the students with an experience as enjoyable and useful as possible.
Slideshows used in the lectures can be found in the Primers section.
