Along with the wide variety of specialized equipment associated with particular research areas, the department is well provided with general facilities. These include well-equipped machine shops staffed by experienced machinists and instrument makers, and an electronics shop with construction and maintenance technicians. An extensive departmental research and teaching library is located in the Physics and Astronomy Building. The Cyclotron Laboratory and its support facilities are housed in a separate building.
Research facilities include
Important off-campus facilities in the high-energy area include the accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois; the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York; the accelerator complex at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and Argonne National Laboratory, where experiments are currently carried out by MSU faculty and students.
The astronomy faculty makes use of the facilities on campus, which include a 0.6m telescope, and of the observatories at Kitt Peak (Arizona), WIRO (Wyoming), Mounts Wilson and Palomar (California), Sliding Springs (Australia), and Cerro Tololo and Las Campanas (Chile). MSU has joined the SOAR consortium to build a 4-meter telescope near La Serena, Chile.
Go to Research Programs
The Physics & Astronomy Department has an extensive infrastructure of computing and data communications equipment that is constantly being upgraded. Faculty, staff and many graduate assistants have PCs or terminals at their desks, which they use for word-processing, electronic mail and to access other computers via departmental, campus and wide area networks. A room with up-to-date computer equipment has recently been made available to graduate students.
The department has a DEC 3000 Model 500X Alpha AXP minicomputer and a Sun Ultra 170e workstation for interactive and batch use in the VMS and UNIX operating systems. The research groups have additional UNIX and OpenVMS workstations for interactive graphics and specialized uses. All graduate students have accounts on the OpenVMS cluster and the central Sun Solaris machine for use with classwork, electronic mail, and serving World-Wide Web pages.
The University has several micro-computer and graphic laboratories available on campus for use by graduate and undergraduate students on a walk-in basis. The Computer Laboratory also maintains a Sun ES6000 Mini-Supercomputer system, and IBM 3090 system with a vectorprocessor, and a number of other Sun Solaris, SGI IRIX, and IBM AIX systems. These and other computers in the Chemistry Department, the Cyclotron Laboratory and other campus locations can be reached using various networks via the campus high-speed fiber network. Remote computers such as the NSF Supercomputing Centers, facilities at other Michigan universities, and at Fermi National Loboratory can be reached through connections to regional, national and international networks.
Graduate students have the opportunity to construct part or all of their research projects in the student shop, located in the basement of the Physics and Astronomy Building. The student shop is equipped with lathes, drill presses, milling machines, band saws and soldering facilities, as well as a full compliment of hand tools. After completing a six-lesson shop course emphasizing safety and machining techniques, students are encouraged to design and build sepecialized equipment for their research. The professional staff of the Department machine shop are available for advice and consultation.