Skip navigation

Division of Natural Sciences & MathematicsDepartment of Physics & Astronomy

Research

Physics & Astronomy

Facilities and Instrumentation

The following major instrumentation is available in the physics building for general use by faculty and students: a high vacuum thermal deposition chamber, an Asylum Research MFP-3D AFM, a Bruker D8 Discover X-ray diffraction instrument, and a JEOL JSM-IC848 SEM with e-beam lithography. The Asylum Research AFM instrument is very versatile and is capable of topographic, photoconductive, scanning tunneling and scanning Kelvin probe microscopy. A machine shop is located in the basement of the building.

A clean room with additional deposition chambers, photolithography equipment, a mask aligner, and a reactive ion etcher are located in the engineering department and are available through the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering.

Faculty, staff, and students have access to the NSM HPC cluster for high performance computational research.  This Aspen Systems cluster is based on the Intel Xeon processor running at 2.44 GHz and consists of 180 CPUs.  It has a total of 227 GB of RAM and 9 TB of raw master hard disk storage.  The system is housed and maintained by University Technology Services and is continuously monitored by Aspen Systems.