Final Reports of the 2020 Los Alamos National Laboratory Computational Physics Student Summer Workshop

Technical Report · Tue Oct 20 04:00:00 UTC 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1680007· OSTI ID:1680007

Abrams, Joshua Rubin ^[1]; May, Asher Paul ^[2]; Dyer, Joshua Wade ^[2]; Ottoway, Crystal Faith ^[3]; Young, Calvin J. ^[4]; Nguyen, Le Viet ^[5]; Keithley, Jeffrey Scott ^[6]; Ozier, Samuel Douglas ^[7]; Blade, Tracy Shane ^[8]; White, Quinn ^[3]; Koskelo, Eliseanne Corinne ^[9]; Lo, Nga Ying ^[10]; Bell, Brian Wesley ^[1]; Taylor, Timothy Joseph ^[11]; Leiendecker, Harrison ^[12]; Warhover, Alex Jacob ^[13]; Somers, Alex Daniel ^[14]; Holguin, Francisco ^[15]; Natan, Tali Marshall ^[16]; Martin, Olivia Grace ^[17] ; Johns, William Richard ^[18]; White, Jackson Richard ^[19]

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1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (United States)
2. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM (United States)
3. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (United States)
4. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)
5. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States)
6. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM (United States)
7. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Mississippi State Univ., Starkville, MS (United States)
8. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Clemson Univ., SC (United States)
9. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
10. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of Copenhagen (Denmark)
11. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
12. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie, WY (United States)
13. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Missouri Univ. of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO (United States)
14. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
15. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
16. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Kenyon College, Gambier, OH (United States)
17. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Tufts Univ., Medford, MA (United States)
18. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Montana State Univ., Bozeman, MT (United States)
19. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Rice Univ., Houston, TX (United States)

For the past ten years, the workshop has been bringing a highly talented and diverse group of student every summer. Students work in teams of two, alongside typically two mentors, on research projects reflecting a broad range of topics within computational physics. In addition, students attend a series of lectures on topics within computational physics, facility tours, and networking events. The program lasts ten weeks, with this year’s workshop running from June 8 to August 14. At the end of the summer, students give a final presentation, along with a written report. Those reports are what make up the remaining sections of this document. Admission to the workshop is by a competitive process, with the mentors forming the selection committee. One of the important accomplishments of the workshop has been to create a student pipeline from diverse schools that sometimes are not normally tapped by LANL recruiting. Many workshop students maintain a continuing relationship with LANL, returning as students interns, post-doctoral researchers, and staff members. Additionally, workshop alumni act as ambassadors for LANL. The result is a wider awareness both of LANL as a potential employer, and of the technical work that happens at LANL. This year, the workshop format was changed in several ways, in order to accommodate the off-site, virtual format. Students worked on LANL virtual desktop systems remotely, also accessing LANL HPC resources. In order to facilitate communication, student were given accounts on both Webex, a video teleconferencing platform, and Mattermost, an online team collaboration and chat platform, similar to Slack. Daily communication between students and mentors was primarily on Mattermost, with Webex conferencing as needed. The lectures were all done on Webex. Given the difficulty of the virtual format, and a concern that students might have video teleconferencing burn-out after an academic semester largely moved to that format, all lectures were optional this year. In spite of this, the attendance was generally high. Lecturers were asked to try to move to a more high-level, ”What is it?,” format. Once again, the students did a tremendous job. Over the course of ten weeks, they did important research across a staggering array of disciplines. The following pages contain the final report for each team’s research efforts. We hope you will find reading them as exciting as it was for us to produce them.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• DOE Contract Number: 89233218CNA000001
• OSTI ID: 1680007
• Report Number(s): LA-UR--20-28407
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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