Undergraduate Contribution
SSX as Student-Integral Lab
As a liberal-arts college, Swarthmore has a purely undergraduate student population. While this means there are no graduate students to conduct research on the machine, it does give undergraduates the opportunity to experience high level, cutting-edge science research in their place. The Swarthmore undergraduates are what make the SSX laboratory successful. The students contrbute in many ways including building hardware and probes, conducting analyses on data or developing simulations. Since its inception, nearly 50 students have added to the SSX's ever growing body of work. In addition to contributing to published work, the students have produced valuable theses, focusing on data analysis topics or diagnostics, as well as making and presenting posters for display both at Swarthmore itself and at the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics annual meeting.
