Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is a new method able to turn any fiber optical cable into a series of detectors t
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.