The department encourages undergraduate research, and many faculty supervise students. The students in the honors program also do research leading to an honors thesis. Below are presented the undergraduate students currently engaged in research and their projects.
Roger McWilliams is supervising three undergraduate researchers. Cawley Vaccarella is doing his honors senior thesis on "Propagation of Lower Hybrid Waves in a Turbulent Plasma" using the Irvine Torus experiment. Frank Albert is working on Langmuir probe diagnostics in the Irvine Torus during his junior year. Steve Dawson has also been working on probe diagnostics for the Irvine Torus during his junior year.
Gary Chanan has been supervising two students working with the wavefront sensing group on the University of California and Cal Tech Keck telescope (see Gary Chanan's article). Catherine Ohara has been reducing data and also testing the computer code which aligns and phases the 36 segments of the telescope's primary mirror. She has also taken wavefront sensing data with the 5 meter telescope on Mount Palomar. Jim Kreuziger has been working with the hardware on the alignment system for the second Keck Telescope and has spent a week at the observatory running preliminary tests on the alignment system.
Alex Maradudin has been supervising three students. Elizabeth Tong has been studying electromagnetic surface shape resonances associated with an isolated ridge or groove on an otherwise planar vacuum-metal interface. Donovan Hawkins has been calculating the interface contribution to the vibrational thermodynamic properties of a liquid solid interface.