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The knowledge and technologies that move our society forward and preserve our international competitive advantage rely upon a highly skilled workforce that is adept at conducting complex scientific and technical research—and in translating its outcome into useful products and services. “Use-inspired” research is driven by specific needs and interests and naturally focuses on socioeconomically advantageous application, whereas academic research tends to be driven by an intrinsic quest for new knowledge. Each has its role in overall technological development, however, the skills and knowledge crucial for success in these domains can differ significantly. To integrate these two approaches in doctoral training in STEM fields, a national workshop of ~100 leaders of industry, academia, funding agencies and non-profits was held with the goal of developing a robust understanding of the current status of the pipeline from graduate degree programs in STEM into professional research environments. At the conclusion, the Workshop participants identified gaps in the present training of STEM doctorates. Then they endorsed the Pasteur Partners PhD (P3) track recently established at Lehigh University as a new model for student-centered workforce training based on use-inspired research in partnership with industry. Here, we present the key outcomes of the workshop and describe the four distinctive features of the P3 program: 1. Pre-program summer internship; 2. Co-advising of students by a university faculty member and an industry researcher; 3. Instructions for developing essential professional skills; 4. Industry Residency (as in medical school). In this context, ‘Industry’ is defined broadly to include private corporations, national labs, defense organizations, healthcare institutes, etc., which hire PhDs. Collectively, we consider this as a model for the much needed redesigning of the US STEM doctoral education to create a national workforce of technical leaders. Finally, challenges to the implementation of the P3 track are identified. Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. https://peer.asee.org/44062 

The Summertime Line Intensity Mapper (SLIM) is a mm-wave line-intensity mapping (mm-LIM) experiment for the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The goal of SPT-SLIM is to serve as a technical and scientific pathfinder for the demonstration of the suitability and in-field performance of multi-pixel superconducting filterbank spectrometers for future mm-LIM experiments. Scheduled to deploy in the 2023-24 austral summer, the SPT-SLIM focal plane will include 18 dual-polarisation pixels, each coupled to an$$R = \lambda / \Delta \lambda = 300$$$R=\lambda /\Delta \lambda =300$thin-film microstrip filterbank spectrometer that spans the 2 mm atmospheric window (120–180 GHz). Each individual spectral channel feeds a microstrip-coupled lumped-element kinetic inductance detector, which provides the highly multiplexed readout for the 10k detectors needed for SPT-SLIM. Here, we present an overview of the preliminary design of key aspects of the SPT-SLIM focal plane array, a description of the detector architecture and predicted performance, and initial test results that will be used to inform the final design of the SPT-SLIM spectrometer array.

 

We report the phase-connected timing ephemeris, polarization pulse profiles, Faraday rotation measurements, and Rotating-Vector-Model (RVM) fitting results of 12 millisecond pulsars (MSPs) discovered with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST survey (CRAFTS). The timing campaigns were carried out with FAST and Arecibo over 3 yr. 11 of the 12 pulsars are in neutron star–white dwarf binary systems, with orbital periods between 2.4 and 100 d. 10 of them have spin periods, companion masses, and orbital eccentricities that are consistent with the theoretical expectations for MSP–Helium white dwarf (He WD) systems. The last binary pulsar (PSR J1912−0952) has a significantly smaller spin frequency and a smaller companion mass, the latter could be caused by a low orbital inclination for the system. Its orbital period of 29 d is well within the range of orbital periods where some MSP–He WD systems have shown anomalous eccentricities, however, the eccentricity of PSR J1912−0952 is typical of what one finds for the remaining MSP–He WD systems.

 

A key component of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey validation (SV) is a detailed visual inspection (VI) of the optical spectroscopic data to quantify key survey metrics. In this paper we present results from VI of the quasar survey using deep coadded SV spectra. We show that the majority (≈70%) of the main-survey targets are spectroscopically confirmed as quasars, with ≈16% galaxies, ≈6% stars, and ≈8% low-quality spectra lacking reliable features. A nonnegligible fraction of the quasars are misidentified by the standard spectroscopic pipeline, but we show that the majority can be recovered using post-pipeline “afterburner” quasar-identification approaches. We combine these “afterburners” with our standard pipeline to create a modified pipeline to increase the overall quasar yield. At the depth of the main DESI survey, both pipelines achieve a good-redshift purity (reliable redshifts measured within 3000 km s⁻¹) of ≈99%; however, the modified pipeline recovers ≈94% of the visually inspected quasars, as compared to ≈86% from the standard pipeline. We demonstrate that both pipelines achieve a median redshift precision and accuracy of ≈100 km s⁻¹and ≈70 km s⁻¹, respectively. We constructed composite spectra to investigate why some quasars are missed by the standard pipeline and find that they are more host-galaxy dominated (i.e., distant analogs of “Seyfert galaxies”) and/or more dust reddened than the standard-pipeline quasars. We also show example spectra to demonstrate the overall diversity of the DESI quasar sample and provide strong-lensing candidates where two targets contribute to a single spectrum.