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Physics Undergraduate Research Thesis (PHYS 590) for 2024-2025

Welcome to the course web page of the 2024-25 edition of PHYS 590, the Physics Undergraduate Research Thesis. This course is intended to give students the opportunity to pursue original research under the guidance of a faculty member on current topics of interest. The calendar description of the course is:

 

Students in PHYS 590 have the chance to make important contributions to leading research questions. This could be through contributing to the analysis of experimental or observational data, contributing to the development of next generation experiments or instruments, or tackling a current theoretical challenge. Past PHYS 590 students have successfully contributed in each of these areas: a list of PHYS 590 topics from the past few years is available. Some projects have even resulted in collaboration technical notes, conference presentations, and publications.

PHYS 590 students select their thesis supervisors at the end of their third year - that is probably why you are looking at this web site!

The main motivation for the early selection is to ensure everyone gets off to a good start in fall term - in the past, when topics were selected in the fall, it would sometimes take until the end of September before all students knew what their topic was. It should be noted that the advanced topic selection is not to be interpreted as an expectation that students will work on their theses over the summer.

To help you in selecting a thesis topic, faculty members have been asked to suggest possible topics. The list, which will be updated from time to time as more suggestions come in, can be found in the file 590 Topics (PDF 66KB ) (last updated May 15, 2024). Many of the topics are rather broad at this point, with the expectation that the student and advisor will develop the specific research plan for the 590 thesis in the fall. Please note also that in many cases Professors who have not submitted topics to the list are still interested in supervising students - so if there is a faculty member you are interested in working with please contact them even if they do not have a topic on the list. It is also fine for you to propose a topic of your own, subject to approval by the course coordinator and provided that you can identify a faculty member willing to supervise the work.

In term of timeline, it is my hope that all students planning to take PHYS 590 next year will have selected a topic and a supervisor (and communicated their selection to me!) by end of May. To prevent anyone from feeling pressured into committing to a topic sooner than they would prefer just to ensure that it doesn't get taken by someone else, there will be a "consultation period" before April 15th during which you are encouraged to think about the available topics and speak with different prospective supervisors, but neither you nor they should commit to anything. After April 15th please confirm with your preferred supervisor that you can work with them and send me an email letting me know that you plan to take 590 and who your faculty advisor will be. Again, it would be great if I could receive that information from you by the end of May.

The slides from the brief presentation I gave in March 2023 introducing 590 and describing the topic selection process are available in the file 590 Intro (PDF 860 KB).

Please note that the PHYS 590 course coordinator for 2024-25 has changed. It is now