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Physics

Facilities
These excellent facilities are among the many features that distinguish the Drexel physics major:

Astrophysics computer laboratory
Numerous Linux workstations support research in numerical astrophysics, particularly in the areas of star-cluster dynamics and cosmology. Internet access to national supercomputer sites is available.

The Joseph R. Lynch Observatory
In 2002, the Physics Department completed construction of a new observatory, which houses a 16" telescope, the largest in Philadelphia. This facility is used both for education and public outreach, as well as for research.

Supercomputing
The Drexel University Physics Department was the first academic department in the country to use Beowulf-type supercomputers, networked Linux systems which can be used to efficiently solve extremely large problems. At present, the Department has 2 active machines, one with 64 processors, primarily dedicated to Nuclear Shell modeling, and one with 96 processors, primarily dedicated to Astrophysical dynamics simulations. In addition, a third machine which will dedicated to protein folding calculations is in the design stages.

Professor Steve McMillan also has a GRAvity PipE (GRAPE) 6 machine, a specialized machine which computes gravitational forces, and which received the Gorden Bell prize as the fastest computer on the planet.

Laboratory for high performance computational physics
Virtually every course makes contact with this facility. The laboratory is fully capable of supporting multimedia work. All of our students are full partners in the software development that takes place in this laboratory, and they have unlimited use of the facility.

Detector development laboratory
Provides experimental support for an international research program in non-accelerator particle and nuclear physics, performing searches for magnetic monopoles, and experiments aimed at the determination of the neutrino mass.

Atomic, molecular, and laser physics
Several workstations to support research on interactions between lasers and molecules, conducting polymers, nonlinear dynamic behavior of atoms and molecules, quantum chaos, and lasing phenomena.

Biophysics
Noted for a pulsed laser laboratory that focuses on the development of instrumentation systems and their application to the measurement of time-dependent biophysical and biochemical phenomena.

Surface physics and nanotechnology laboratory
An excellent experimental facility studying atomic systems; uses a scanning
tunneling microscope and nuclear force microscope to study surface phenomena on atomic scales.