Abstract:

Since 1984 the Italian groups of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) collaborating with the national DOE laboratory of Fermilab (Batavia, Illinois, USA) have been running a two months long summer training program for Italian university students. A first report on this program was presented in 2012 at the Madrid ICERI conference (E. Barzi, G. Bellettini, S. Donati, “The Italian Summer Students Program at the Fermi national Accelerator Laboratory”, Proceedings of ICERI 2012).

In the first year the program involved only a few Pisa physics students. The program was later extended to engineering students. Since 2004 the program is supported in part by DOE in the frame of an exchange agreement with INFN. An additional agreement for sharing support for engineers of the Scuola Superiore di S.Anna (SSSA) of Pisa was established in 2007 between SSSA and Fermilab, according to which about four students are supported each year. In 2010-2015 the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation (ISSNAF) has raised funds to contribute to the Fermilab program, at a rate of about two to four students per year.

Over the 30 years of its history, the program has involved several hundreds of Italian students. With the support of Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation (ISSNAF) and the Cultural Association of Italians at Fermilab (CAIF), the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Space telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Langone Medical Center in New York, the Columbia University, SLAC, the University of Arizona, Princeton University, the University of Colorado Boulder, Purdue University, and Stanford University, hosted 18 additional students. The training programs spanned from physics analysis of high energy proton-antiproton collisions to construction of particle detectors and accelerator components to R/D on superconductive elements to theory of accelerators, to analysis of astrophysical data and analysis of medical data.

In summer 2013 the Italian Consiglio Nazionale degli Ingegneri (CNI), in collaboration with ISSNAF, financed one additional internship at Fermilab, which was awarded to a recently graduated Engineer. In 2014-2016 CNI financed 5 fellowships at Fermilab. This is a recent expansion of the program, which may result in a larger number of young CNI-ISSNSAF engineers to be hosted for training periods at Fermilab.

In 2015 the University of Pisa created an ad-hoc Summer School and all the Fermilab interns are temporarily enrolled at the University of Pisa for the duration of the internship. Upon successful completion of the program, and positive evaluation of a University of Pisa committee, students are acknowledged ECTS credits which can be used for the Master Degree.

At the end of the stages the students are required to write summary reports on their achievements, which are saved in the Fermilab and University of Pisa web pages as elements of the students curricula, for consultation and any possible future use.

Information on student recruiting methods, on detailed training programs of recent years, on raised funding, and on final student`s evaluation will be given in the presentation.

Keywords:

Physics, Advanced Learning, internship international Laboratory.