REU Field Trips, 2016

This REU program
was funded through
NSF PHY-1560482.

UC Davis REU Field Trips: 2016

Lick Observatory

On the program's first weekend, the REU group and several UC Davis graduate students drove up the winding road to Lick Observatory. (Above left, you can make out an especially tight hairpin turn near the center of the picture.) A tour of the facility included the large oven (below) located in the basement below the 3-meter reflecting telescope and used for redoing the aluminum coating of its mirror when necessary. We were also able to view through the 36-inch refracting telescope (above right -- for scale, note the operator on top of the telescope stand). This was once the largest in the world but is no longer used for research purposes. In fact it remains one of the world's largest refractors, but modern telescopes are all reflectors since much larger mirrors can be used for the same length of the telescope.

McClellan Nuclear Research Center

We visited the UC Davis-operated nuclear reactor at the former McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento. We saw the vast rooms designed for radiography of airplanes and heard about plans for expanding the facility for production of rare, medically useful isotopes. As always, the highlight of the tour was looking into the reactor core at the blue glow of Cerenkov radiation. One oddity of this site is that the reactor core below ground level. This location was for safety reasons; being on an air force base, a design concern was the (small) possibility that an aiplane could miss its landing and roll into the reactor building.

Lake Tahoe

The Incline Village location of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center is just over the California state line, so to get there we drove along the edge of the lake past the casinos marking the Nevada side of the border. We watched a 3D video describing the lake, its formation, and the deadly tidal wave that could develop after a serious earthquake. Another highlight was the illuminated sandpile where visitors can construct landscapes and watch how water would traverse them. After a stop at Commons Beach in Tahoe City, we reached Professor Chiang's home where we spent the night. The following day part of the group hiked to the Five Lakes (above -- the lake we swam in was far smaller than Lake Tahoe!) while others lounged at the house.

REU Alumni Visits and Big Basin Redwoods State Park

Several former UC Davis REU students have jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area. We arranged to meet three of them, who described the paths they took to get to their current positions. Two do data science, one as CEO of his own company, and the third works at a place that builds commercial and government satellites. (A fourth student, now a high school physics teacher, unfortunately woke up sick and couldn't make it.) The former students we spoke to had all earned science PhDs and spoke about the value of learning how to make progress on a large unsolved problem by picking it apart into smaller, more manageable questions and attacking them instead.

We continued south to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, with its very old and very large trees. The right photo covers less than half the radius of a trunk segment from a tree cut down in the 1800's.

Lassen Volcanic National Park

The Lassen trip went particularly well this year. At Subway Cave, a lava tube just north of the park, we ducked into a cavern off the main tube and shut off our lights. Usually other visitors wander by with flashlights every minute or so, but this time we had perhaps ten photon-free minutes, plenty of time to start hallucinating. We had a sample of otherworldly scenery at the Cinder Cone and at the main hydrothermal area Bumpass Hell. By contrast, the hike from King's Creek Picnic Area to Bumpass Hell passed through flower-filled meadows and overlooked a gorgeous mountain lake, with no hint of the nearby volcanic activity.

Student-Organized Excursions

We can't hit all of the great northern Californian destinations in one summer, but subsets of REU students arranged their own trips to Yosemite (left) and Muir Beach (right).