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 Bonding state charge on a hydrogen-covered palladium surface. |
Student
Group
The on-campus enrollment at Michigan State University for the 2007 fall semester was approximately 46,000, including about 10,000 graduate and professional students. There were 150 graduate students in the Physics-Astronomy department and approximately 20 postdoctoral research associates.
Location
Michigan State University is located in East Lansing, a residential city, and is close to Lansing, the state capital. Many opportunities for cultural and social development are offered by the University and neighboring civic groups. Examples include the Wharton Center for the Performing Arts, the Boarshead Theater, the Kresge Art Center, the University Museum, and the lecture-concert, World Travel, and foreign film series.
The University
Michigan State University, one of the nation's oldest land-grant colleges, was founded in 1855. It has since developed into a major university comprising 17 colleges, and many fields of concentration for graduate study and training. More than 100 departments offer 200 different programs leading to undergraduate and graduate degrees. The university campus is well known for its natural beauty and spaciousness, its park-like walks, and its trees and flowering gardens. Extensive indoor and outdoor athletic facilities are available for general use by the university community.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy
Along with the wide variety of specialized equipment associated with particular research areas listed below, the department is well provided with general facilities. These include well-equipped machine shops and electronics shops, and an extensive departmental research and teaching library. The Physics-Astronomy department moved in 2002 into the new Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building, the largest academic building on the campus of Michigan State University. Designed as the centerpiece of the emerging scientific complex at the heart of the campus, this new facility is connected to the Biochemistry and Chemistry buildings by walkways at several levels. These architectural connections symbolize the extensive cross-disciplinary contacts and expanded cooperation that this new building encourages.
Research Facilities
Nuclear physics research facilities include two superconducting cyclotrons; the modern A1900 fragment separator that allows efficient production and in-flight separation of rare isotopes; the high-resolution S800 superconducting magnetic spectrograph; neutron, charged-particle and gamma ray detectors. Condensed matter physics facilities include X-ray apparatus; extensive photo and electron-beam lithographic facilities; atomic force and electron microscopes; a micro-Raman spectrometer; cryogenic facilities; superconducting magnets; two automated SQUID magnetometers; an electron spin resonance laboratory; an ultrahigh-vacuum sputtering system; an electron photoemission spectrometer; a scanning tunneling microscope. Elementary particle physics research facilities include a state-of-the-art electronics design facility where detectors for experiments are developed, tested, and constructed. MSU investigators and students have links to important off-campus facilities such as the accelerator complexes at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The astronomy and astrophysics faculty utilizes the campus 0.6m telescope, as well as other national and international observatories. MSU is a leading partner in the SOAR consortium which built a 4m telescope at Cerro Pachon in Chile. This telescope will be the most advanced infrared optimized optical instrument of its kind in the southern hemisphere. In all research areas, large numbers of computers and workstations are available for detector design, data acquisition, and analysis.