Facilities

Department and Facilities

The physics department has five full-time faculty with diverse interests and specializations. Our full-time staff includes a secretary, a machinist and instrument maker, and an electronics technician.

The Olin Center for Physics and Chemistry provides more than 40,000 square feet of classroom, laboratory, library, and study space. Facilities and equipment include: a physics lecture theatre with advanced video and lecture demonstration facilities; well-equipped introductory laboratories; a large machine shop; a research astronomical observatory; remote observing laboratory for studying the galatic interstellar medium from Kitt Peak, Arizona; a stellar photometry research facility; a solar telescope and spectrograph; a laboratory for electrical instrumentation; and an advanced laboratory for ongoing student projects. There are also special student-faculty research laboratories for astrophysics, spectroscopy, optical and electron microcroscopy, biophysics, computational physics, critical phenomena, and holography.

The college has a robust set of computing resources. Macintosh, Windows, and UNIX platforms are all available and are connected seamlessly by an extensive network with full Internet access.