Time is nearing for my 6th semester in April where I need to do my bachelor-work (3 months fulltime work). I’m quite uncertain which one I should chose. On the one side, I really love theoretical physics but on the other I like experiments containing lasers.

So far I have the following choices:

Optical dipole-trap

This is build upon a realy strong laser. If you focus it, atoms will get sucked into the zone of highest intensity (into the focus). This sounds quite interesting and involves much work with lasers. It’s used to trap and cool down atoms to reach Bose-Einstein Condensation, a special state of matter.

Optimizing a glasfiber

The title doesn’t sound very interesting, but it’s not boring. It’s a fiber between two of our institutes (around a km in distance) where they need the light really stable on the other end. And that’s not trivial. The usage is to sync the already existing optical clock in the institute for quantum optics with the lasers in the albert-einstein-instutute concerning their LISA-experiment.

Black holes in 5 dimensions

This one also sounds interesting. “Normal” spacetime has four dimensions, three in space and one in time. Modern theories predict further spacial dimensions and my work would be to fiddle around with a special fieldequation for a black hole (Schwarzschild-metric) to extend it in higher dimensions. This has been done before, but a bachelor-work (in theoretical physics) isn’t meant to be on the same level like e.g. a PhD-work. Therefore, my knowledge is still too small and time too short.

There are others (I know about at least 90 different works), but those three are those I’m most interested in.