Between Spring 2005 and present, significant resources and effort have gone into upgrading PHY474, Senior Laboratory, a hands-on required Physics course whose intent is to expose students to the “real world” of experimental physics. Up until 2005, many of the experiments were in such a state that they were either inoperable or in need of rebuild/repair beyond the capacity of the students and the course. In Spring 2005, Dean Jeff Brumfield [College of Natural Sciences (CNS)] made the commitment to provide sufficient resources to bring this laboratory course to a state-of-the-art activity and a course that would become a showcase laboratory of CNS. Significant resources were provided by CNS every year since Spring 2005.

These funds were used for improvements to the following experiments: Sonoluminescence, Raman Scattering, X-Ray Fluorescence, Neutron Activation, Mossbauer Spectroscopy, Low Energy Electron Diffraction, Plasma Characteristics, and Speed of Light. In addition, sufficient equipment was purchased so that “sharing” of equipment among the various experiments was not necessary. Besides repair, upgrade, and modernization of these existing experiments, several new experiments were implemented. These include Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Muon Lifetime, Mechanical Chaos, Josephson Junction, Compton Scattering, and Scanning Tunnelling Microscope.

The course is now in a state that the students do not need to just get the equipment working as it did sometime in the “distant past,” but rather use it to do new, novel, student initiated, experiments that foster initiative and creativity. We hope that CNS will provide continued support over the coming years. On the horizon are new experiments in modern optics using diode laser spectroscopy. We hope to be able to obtain funds to purchase a tunable laser system designed for exploring a wide range of atomic and optical physics phenomena that include the following experiments: