Dorothea Altorfer, wife of one of our faculty members, created an event at the Fete de la Nature in Arnaudville, LA
Physics Department to Open New Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory
Tue, 03/22/2016 - 10:15amThe Grant & Melissa Gibson Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory is made possible by a fund established by Dr. and Mrs. Grant Gibson, the former being a UL Lafayette Physics alumnus. The goal of the new laboratory is to involve students in active research projects coordinated by physics faculty. It will offer students from across a range of majors---physics, geosciences, engineering, biology, computer science---the opportunity to do interdisciplinary research in materials science, biophysics, geophysics, nuclear physics, applied optics and acoustics/ultrasonics. A new curriculum, being developed specially for this lab, will first introduce students to instrumentation and research techniques through specialized hands-on experiments, after which they will join a research project. The preliminary familiarization experiments include basic electronics, phase-sensitive detection, phase-locked loops, modulation/demodulation, frequency mixing, operation of oscilloscopes, signal analyzers, lock-in amplifiers etc. Examples of projects are optical and ultrasonic imaging, optical information processing, laser Doppler velocimetry, dynamic scattering from suspensions and emulsions, nuclear spectroscopy, ultrasonic materials characterization and many others.