Facilities
The Physics Department is housed in Valders Hall of Science. The department's laboratory facilities are equipped with 25,000 square feet of laboratory space, a planetarium, the Rossing Physics Library and Exploration Center, and an impressive array of instruments for instruction and research.
Take a virtual tour of Valders Hall
Laboratory Equipment
Physics students use a wide range of equipment and technology, including:
- Veeco Instruments NanoscopeV MultiModeV Atomic Force Microscope for use in studies of friction at the nanoscale
- eight-node high performance computing cluster running Linux Rocks available for numerically intensive calculations, including simulations of fullerenes and other atomic systems
- 128-node Xeon/Opteron computing cluster used for the analysis and simulation of data as part of the international collaborations Belle and Belle II
- two 10” telescopes, two 12” telescopes, 16” telescope, 4 CCD cameras and supporting hardware for use in astronomy research, student projects, classes, and public observing
- high-pressure gas panel, four LeCroy 2264 waveform recorders and assorted NIM and CAMAC electronics for studies of scintillation properties of noble gases
- lasers, including tunable dye-pulse laser and high-power He-Ne laser
- atomic and nuclear physics equipment for use in Advanced Laboratory and Senior Project, including turbo pumping vacuum system, atomic shell apparatus, optical pumping apparatus, Zeeman effect apparatus, Rutherford scattering apparatus, high-resolution germanium gamma-ray spectrometer, five Millikan oil drop chambers, five electron e/m tubes and four Franck-Hertz devices
- 10 moderate resolution and 3 high resolution optical spectrometers
- two TMC Optical Air Tables with supporting hardware
- four Tektronix TDS-210 digital oscilloscopes, five Tektronix TDS-2004 digital storage oscilloscopes, Tektronix TDS-1002 digital storage oscilloscope, Tektronix DP04104 digital storage oscilloscope, three programmable power supplies and three Keithley picoammeters