INVOLVING UNDERGRADUATES IN GEOLOGICAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROJECTS USING PIXE

For more than 15 years, undergraduate oceanography and physics majors at the United States Naval Academy have been offered opportunities to pursue individual research projects utilizing the Academy Physics Department’s Proton Induced X-Ray Emission (PIXE) facility.

While these students demonstrated a wide range of abilities and varying interests, they typically had not excelled in the classroom environment. Interestingly, however, these midshipmen performed beyond expectation when given opportunities to see projects to completion and this work became a highlight of each one’s undergraduate education. In most instances, their research was not pursued as a typical one, two or three credit hour course, but as a non-credit activity carried-out in coordination with faculty members during their mutual free time.

Employing PIXE, our students have investigated such diverse man-made and natural materials as bricks, pottery, smoking pipes, ship artifacts, oysters, obsidian points, ocean floor basalts and sulfides from MOR black-smoker chimneys.

This presentation will share observations made about engaging Naval Academy midshipmen in research.