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Accomplished, Dedicated People The strength of Auburn's Physics Department lies in its renowned faculty and skilled staff. All 23 full time faculty members have Ph.D.'s in physics from outstanding institutions throughout the country. Fourteen are full professors, five are associate professors, and four are assistant professors. Two are distinguished Walter Professors, one is a Scharnagel Professor, and another a Carr Professor. Several have come to Auburn from industrial research and development laboratories, sharing their experience and exposing students to the full spectrum of career opportunities. A support staff of an administrative assistant, receptionist and accountant serves both faculty and students by performing a myriad of administrative tasks. An experienced machinist manages a fully equipped Machine and Welding Shop and assists students in the Student Machine Shop. Graduate teaching assistants are aided in handling their assignments in the undergraduate physics laboratory classes by a laboratory manager. Computer workstations, a Beowulf cluster, and a local area network are managed by a full time staff member.
In addition to its outstanding people, the Physics Department boasts state-of-the-art facilities for performing research at the forefront of science. The new Semiconductor Physics Laboratory contains facilities for epitaxial growth of semiconductors and extensive diagnostic instrumentation. The Surface Science Laboratory includes facilities for complete analysis of surfaces in both a static and time-dependent mode. The newly completed Compact Toroidal Hybrid, a magnetic confinement fusion device, is being used to test new theories of plasma containment and to help understand the intricacies of plasma transport and dynamics. The Accelerator Laboratory employs a 2 MV linear accelerator to apply the techniques of nuclear physics to probing the structure of solids, surfaces, and their interfaces. The Laboratory for NanoPhotonics provides for the use of advances in solid state physics and optics to manipulate, utilize, and study light-matter interaction in a reduced dimension. Nanophotonics is a branch of applied physics which deals with light-matter interaction on the nanometer scale. In this laboratory, the exciting field of nanophotonics with emphasis on semiconductor nanostructure, near-field optics, optical characterization, photonic device fabrication, and biophotonics is explored with the goal of taking a quantum leap into the future of nanophotonics. The AMO Physics Laboratory houses instruments for studying the interaction of atoms and molecules with ionizing radiation. In particular, Cold Target Recoil Ion Momentum Spectroscopy is used to simultaneously measure the momenta of multiple particles produced in collisions of ion, electrons and photons with atoms and molecules. Multihit detectors with sub-nanosecond time resolution and sub-millimeter spatial resolution are used to image the momentum space continuum probability distributions resulting from these fundamental processes. Auburn physicists make extensive use of a local Beowulf cluster, PRISM. PRISM is constructed from 48 dual processor AMD Athlon machines. In addition to local machines, we have over 106 cpu hours on national supercomputers, including machines at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
The Auburn University Physics Department has a strong commitment to science education. In the introductory level courses designed for engineers, pre-professional students, and non-science majors, our faculty are pioneering the use of personal response systems, electronic homework, and web-based learning. Our undergraduate majors are provided a thorough grounding in basic physics with ample opportunity to explore their individual interests with many hours available for electives. Graduate students graduate fully prepared for a wide range of employment opportunities as evidenced by their success in obtaining jobs in their fields of interest. |