Manipulating Quantum Systems: An Assessment of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics in the United States (2020)
Chapter: Appendix E: Data Solicitation and Collection
E
Data Solicitation and Collection
DATA SOLICITATION FROM FEDERAL AGENCIES
Nine federal agencies (Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Energy, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research,) that fund atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) research were asked to respond to the following questions.
Questions on Funding
In order to understand the impact of federal funding on AMO research, the AMO2020 committee is seeking the answers to the following questions:
- What is the absolute number of dollars spent on AMO research each year over the past decade at your agency?
- What is the distribution of grant size each year for the past 10 years? The above questions aim to understand if funding for AMO sciences has remained robust over the past decade. We would appreciate if the relevant program officer would aggregate AMO spending across all programs at the agency.
- Over the past decade, how many awards go to grantees each year as a function of the grantee’s time past PhD. We can divide this into three time spans: 5 years after PhD, 10 years after PhD, and beyond 10 years.
Questions on Interagency Activities and Partnerships
As AMO research grows increasingly cross-disciplinary in nature, the committee is interested in understanding how funding is distributed between large-scale research and single-PI groups. To this end, we pose the following questions to the funding agencies.
- If your agency support centers or large-group efforts in AMO science, what is the size of the awards per year for centers relative to the total budget spent on AMO each year?
- Briefly describe the extent to which your agency supports interdisciplinary activities that include AMO science.
- Briefly describe the extent of industrial participation in AMO awards and how this has changed over the past 10 years.
DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONNAIRE
In order to ensure that opportunities in AMO sciences are accessible to a diverse set of practitioners, the committee would like to understand the level of participation for women and underrepresented minorities. To this end, we pose the following questions to professional societies that fund or support atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) research.
- Over the past 10 years, what is the total number of Ph.D. degrees granted at U.S. institutions each year?
- Of that total, how many degrees each year were granted in an AMO-related field?
- Of the degrees granted in an AMO-related field, how many each year were granted to
- Women
- Underrepresented minorities
These data will be used to make a plot that shows the number of AMO-related Ph.D.s relative to total physics Ph.D.s granted as a function of time, as well as the fraction of those AMO-related degrees that go to women and underrepresented minorities.
