The Department of Physics has a wide variety of facilities for classroom and research activities. Because St. Vincent College is a small school, all of these facilities are available for use by undergraduate students. While many of these facilities are used in courses required by the physics major, they may also be used by students for research projects of their own interest.
- General Physics Laboratories
- Modern Physics Laboratory
- Electronics Laboratory
- Optics Laboratory
- Supercomputing Facilities
- Other Facilities
The General Physics Laboratories include fairly standard equipment, including apparatus for experiments in mechanics, electrostatics, electric circuits, optics, and acoustics.
The Modern Physics course is accompanied by a laboratory held in the Modern Physics Laboratory. This laboratory contains an X-Ray Spectrometer, radiation detection and counting equipment, and a Franck Hertz apparatus, among others. Physics students are usually introduced to this laboratory as first-semester juniors.
Electronics
Another subject to which students are normally introduced as first-semester
juniors is
Electrical Circuits and Electronics. The electronics laboratory
has the capability to program most programmable devices, including EPROMs,
GALs, PALs, and microcontrollers.
Students learn to develop both hardware and software for the PIC series of microcontrollers
produced by MicroChip, including surface-mount versions. The laboratory is equipped with a dedicated PIC programmer and
complete assembly language development environment. Each student workstation
includes both analog and digital multimeters, function generator(s), digital oscilloscope, various
power supplies, and prototyping materials. In addition, the laboratory has the
the facilities to design and fabricate single and double sided printed
circuit boards with both through-hole and surface mount components,
which the students use near the end of the course.
The Department of Physics at St. Vincent College offers an upper level course
in optics which includes a laboratory experience, a rarity among small liberal
arts colleges. Within the Optics Laboratory are a darkroom, holography lab,
and a Fourier Processing lab. There is also a research grade spectrometer,
a 50W continuous-wave CO2 laser, and a host of standard optical components.
In order to support faculty research and student experience with current
trends in supercomputing, the Department of Physics has two parallel
computing clusters. The first is an 8-node cluster
of 500 MHz Pentium-III computers. This cluster is capable of computational
speeds in excess of 1 Giga-FLOP. The second cluster is comprised of
three 4-processor SMP machines, each with at least 1 Gb RAM and 40 Gb of
drive storage. Both clusters use Linux(TM) as the operating system
and are used by students and faculty to develop parallel
code using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. The clusters
are set up and administered in a manner similar to the National Science
Foundation Tera-Grid Supercomputing sites.
Other dedicated facilities available to students in the physics department include:
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