September 11, 2009
The Office of the Vice President for International Affairs at Indiana University has announced "an Agreement of Friendship and Cooperation between Tsinghua University and Indiana University," starting on July 31, 2009, for two years. The Low-Energy Neutron Source (LENS) and the Advanced Electron Photon Accelerator (ALPHA) at Indiana University and the Hadron Application and Technology Center (HATC) at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, plan to cooperate in order to advance mutual interests in the development of compact neutron and photon sources. Prof. Paul Sokol is the point of contact for IU and Prof. Jei Wei is the point of contact for Tsinghua. The agreement will allow the exchange of graduate students, postdocs and faculty. In addition, summer schools for graduate students will be held yearly with the location alternating between Bloomington and Beijing. The first school is planned for summer 2010 at LENS.
Prof. Paul Sokol and Prof. Dave Baxter of IUCF’s LENS group traveled to Beijing in June 2009 to speak at a workshop on Compact Pulsed Hadron Sources (CPHS09), and to discuss cooperation between the two universities. Dr Chun Loong and Dr Zhiyu Guo of Tsinghua University paid reciprocal visits to IUCF in the summer.
The cooperative agreement with Tsinghua is part of continuing research, educational and outreach programs of the LENS and ALPHA faculty. The LENS faculty currently support five graduate students and three post doctoral fellows in neutron scattering projects utilizing the Small Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) instrument and the polarized neutron Relectometer (SESAME). This summer the LENS group also mentored several undergraduate students in research projects through the Physics Department Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program. The ALPHA faculty currently support six graduate students and one postdoctoral fellow with research interest in advanced accelerator design and Inverse Compton Scattering.
