The physics department is housed in Valders Hall of Science. The physics 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.

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 turbopumping 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