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We are delighted that you agreed to visit FRIB and are very much looking forward to your seminar.

Information concerning the target audience, and the purpose of the seminar, which may prove helpful, is listed below.

The time limit is 50 minutes, including discussions. The nuclear seminar starts at 4:10 p.m., so please conclude your talk at 5:00 p.m. sharp. - A good length is (45 +/- 5) minutes with an additional 5-10 minutes at the end for questions and discussion. Any longer will test the patience of the audience.

Our audience is composed of 60 to 120 people and is unusually diverse.

The audience for the seminar includes graduate students, postdocs, and faculty working both in theory and experiment in the subfields of nuclear structure & reactions, nuclear astrophysics, tests of fundamental symmetries, radiochemistry, and accelerator science & engineering. Although it is called a “seminar,” the presentation is more in the style of a colloquium that should be accessible to a broad nuclear science audience at a junior graduate student level.

The talk should be prepared for a first-year graduate student level audience who has had a strong general modern physics course at the undergraduate level.

The audience will be very diverse, as we have many experimental and theoretical research groups that work on a wide range of very different topics, plus accelerator physicists and astrophysicists. Please direct your talk at the non-experts on the specific sub-field presented. There also will be many graduate students. It would be great if the talk would be, at least for a large fraction, accessible to graduate students.

The purpose of the nuclear seminar is to communicate cutting-edge research to a broad audience with interest and some background in nuclear science, and in some cases limited background. The goal of our seminars is to bring people together to learn about what is happening in the wider world of nuclear science. Seminars are meant to be informative, enjoyable and appeal to experts and non-experts alike. Because we have a very broad audience, the Nuclear Science Seminar should be thought of as equivalent to a Colloquium in a physics department.

The audience doesn't just want to understand the physics, they also want to understand why the physics is interesting and exciting. The first 1/3 of the talk should provide substantial background and motivation. Reviewing material that the audience “should already know” is vital because it makes the ideas fresh on their mind and better prepares them to anticipate and receive the information in the latter part of the talk.

A common misconception is that the audience is knowledgeable of all research areas for which FRIB is well known for. Given the diversity of the laboratory, this is not the case. There is no danger at all to “carry coal to Newcastle.”

Less is often more. A talk from which the audience remembers one interesting piece of science has already accomplished a lot. We recommend, in particular, to avoid switching topics towards the end of the talk. There is no need to cover an area in a comprehensive way - again the majority of the audience members will not be experts but just want to learn something interesting. Ending a few minutes early so there is more time for questions is perfectly fine and even might be more effective! Equations on Power Point slides are difficult to digest. As a rule of thumb, it takes as much time to fully communicate it to the majority of the audience, as it would to write the equation on a blackboard.

More information for Speaker is here.