The new Hugel Science Center includes a number of excellent facilities both for teaching and for faculty/student research. These facilities are an important part of the Lafayette Leadership Campaign.
Lafayette maintains outstanding facilities for instructional laboratories in physics.
The introductory laboratory rooms contain twenty microcomputers interfaced to the Vernier LoggerPro data acquisition system. Students get hands-on experience with experiments in all the major areas of introductory physics, including mechanics, thermodynamics, oscillations and waves, electricity and magnetism, and optics.
The intermediate and advanced classes have dedicated lab space with extensive computing support for performing experiments in a variety of fields.
The Advanced Physics Laboratory rooms house a multichannel analyzer, a crystal scintillation detector for nuclear decay experiments, a Korg DSS-1 sampling synthesizer for research in acoustics, a spectrum analyzer, digital oscilloscope, and a variety of other optical and electronic diagnostic equipment.
Metzgar Fields are home to the department's Celestron C14 optical telescope, equipped with a cooled CCD camera and available for student research projects in astronomy. The department also maintains an observatory at nearby Merril Creek Reservoir.
A radiotelescope based on a 16m diameter satellite TV antenna sits on the roof of the Hugel Science Center, with associated electronic equipment housed below it in on the first floor.
A National Science Foundation grant has enabled us to acquire 8 acoustics workstations and a sampling synthesizer.
Access to the college's computer network is available to majors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through the computers in Room 40. That room houses 4 Unix workstations and 2 Windows computers.
Student participation in research is an important part of the physics program at Lafayette. There are a variety of opportunities, during the academic year as well as during the summer and Interim session, to become involved in a significant way in a research project.
Andy Kortyna maintains a laser laboratory for the study of atomic and molecular physics using laser spectroscopic techniques
David Hogenboom operates a high pressure laboratory, in which the compressibility of liquids and plastic solids can be measured at pressures up to four thousand atmospheres.
Andy Dougherty has a digital image processing system to control and study instabilities and pattern formation.
The Department, in cooperation with the Chemistry Department, operates a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometer for biophysics (and other) research.
All faculty members have microcomputers or workstations in their offices, and a local area network connects the offices and most laboratories to one another and to the Academic Computer Center.