They spend from a few months to two years at the partner company or lab. About a dozen private and public companies are involved with AIM, in medical instrumentation, energy, defense, and space, among other fields. The main thing is to quickly produce a PhD who has worked on sensors or computer modeling. The organizers hope to stabilize the program at about 40 students total, and eventually to expand it to include postdocs. Bj rn Davidsson, an astronomy AIM student, is doing computer simulations of gas flow in porous media to develop a thermal model of cometary nuclei.
Potential applications are more obvious in fields such as nuclear physics.
Joakim Klug's elastic neutron scattering experiments, for example, are relevant for decreasing the halflife of spent fuel by radioactive waste transmutation. For the industrial part of his studies, Klug may help restart a nuclear power plant after fuel replacement. But the extra bonus with AIM is that I get some insight into how research is being done in a larger company, and that I can create contacts for possible future employment. But the most important thing is to get well-educated people. Maybe this program will help get all the good ideas out of the university and into applications.