Research - Faculty and Student Projects

The Physics faculty are involved in a variety of research programs, geared toward providing our undergraduates with the opportunity to do original research in conjunction with their classwork. Many of our students even publish their research before leaving SCSU.

Astronomy and Astrophysics Research: The department maintains an active research program in astronomy and astrophysics with a research and teaching observatory on campus as well as a network of PCs running Linux, allowing students to reduce their observations using IRAF and IDL, the two most commonly used packages in the field today. Links to some of the research groups are provided below.

• Cometary Research (Womack)
• Native Skywatchers Research (Lee)

Physics Research: Faculty maintain active research programs in optics and nuclear physics. Student involvement is very important in these programs. Below are links to current research.

• Optics (Harlander/Dalton/Lidberg):
  This research involves students in research using sophisticated laser spectroscopy experiments to study how the
  disordered glass environment affects the optical properties of lanthanide ions, including praeseodymium, europium, samarium and ytterbium. Undergraduate physics majors are involved in all aspects of the research, from sample preparation to writing papers and making presentations.
• Nuclear Physics (Haglin)
  Prof. Kevin Haglin specializes in relativistic quantum field theories at finite temperature, particle production in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, electromagnetic probes of subatomic dynamics, chromodynamics and hadrodynamics. In lay person terms, "he calculates stuff".