The Physics Department has a General Physics Lab for the lower-division physics, astronomy, and electronics courses and a Computational & Modern Physics Lab for upper-division physics courses. The General Physics Lab is equipped with a number of electronic devices and several state-of-the-art computer interfaced equipment from PASCO. The Computational & Modern Physics Lab is equipped with several high-tech instruments, including a sophisticated table-top Cosmic Ray Muon Detector, Cloud Chamber, Speed of Light apparatus, Photoelectric Effect apparatus, Milliken Oil-drop apparatus, and an E/M apparatus. The lab is also equipped with three (one 8-node and two 12-node) Beowulf Clusters for the Computational Physics course to carry out various parallel processing tasks.
The Physics Department has a state-of-the-art 10 Teraflops 51-node (384-core) Supercomputer with 1.3 TB of distributed RAM and 375 TB of disk storage space that is linked to the prestigious national Open Science Grid (OSG) cyber-infrastructure. This is the third largest Super-computing facility in the state of Kentucky and we are the only institution in Kentucky to be part of OSG consortium. The supercomputer is being used to conduct the research tasks with the ATLAS high energy physics experiment at the LHC at CERN.
The Physics Department has a state-of-the-art Advanced Visualization and Computation Laboratory (AVCL) that has been setup with the next generation video-wall technology, called Hiperwall (Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall). The lab has a 16 Megapixel 16-ft-wide by 5-ft-high tiled display-wall connected to 9 high-end Tier4 Data Analysis workstations equipped with multi-core dual-NVIDIA graphics cards that provides parallel processing capabilities which will allow the visualization of large datasets with a very high resolution.
The department also has two telescopes- a 10 inch Meade LX 200GPS telescope and a 14 inch Meade LX 200EMC telescope with CCD Imaging system for observations.