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UBC Physics and Astronomy Facilities
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The internationally recognized research
performed by Physics & Astronomy faculty and their students is supported by superb facilities,
both within the department, and in various related institutions on campus.
Some of the facilities available in the Hennings Building include:
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The Hennings Building is centrally located on the UBC Campus
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Electronics, Machine Shops, and Technical Services
The department provides a very high
level of skilled technical support along with modern equipment and facilities.
The shops include the main machine shop with six full-time technicians,
and a computer-controlled milling machine; the electronics
shop with a supervising engineer and three technicians; the well-equipped
and supervised student machine shop; the shared-technical services facility
with two technicians to provide liquid helium and maintenance of research
equipment; and a crystal preparation room.
The department has its own stores facility and
the undergraduate laboratories have their own technical support.
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satellite construction in Hennings lab
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Computing Resources
The department supports a large network of computers (~1000 nodes) with
a 1GB fiber backbone connection to the
high-speed UBC campus network.
Our general purpose server is a
Sun Solaris E3000 with 4-250MZ processors and 4GB memory.
Software includes: Mathematica, TeX/LaTeX, Netscape,
and pine. The facilities of the Hennings computer labs
are available to all department members.
In addition, individual research groups have their own computer
systems - including
the Experimental Particle Physics cluster and file server,
the von Neumann cluster
and
the SteamEngine cluster.
VideoConference Facility
Physics and astronomy students, staff and faculty have access to
a VTEL videoconference facility located in the Hennings building.
The facility is most often used by the particle
physicists for international meetings, and by the co-op office for
student-employer interviews. Use is expanding
to include live videocast of lectures here in our physics and astronomy
department, and at other universities.
TRIUMF - Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics
TRIUMF
is at the south end of the UBC
campus; it hosts hundreds of research physicists, including UBC faculty
members and graduate students, thus allowing UBC Physics graduate students
to conduct thesis research in an international scientific atmosphere.
The facility is centred on the world's largest cyclotron, which accelerates
H‾ ions to 500 MeV, providing intense proton, pion, and muon beams
for studies of nucleon interactions, nuclear structure,
electroweak interactions, medical imaging, and biophysics. The muon
beam lines are the heart of a world-class
Muon User Facility
for condensed-matter studies.
The cyclotron also produces intense beams of rare short-lived isotopes for the
ISAC
(Isotope Separation and ACceleration)
facility. This is the world's leading source of light short-lived
isotope beams (A < 30), and since its commissioning in 2001 has
supported experiments in nuclear astrophysics, nuclear structure,
condensed-matter physics, and testing the Standard Model. ISAC-I,
the first stage, consists of production target, ion source, mass
separator, and two linear accelerators: a 35-MHz radio-frequency
quadrupole (RFQ) linac accelerating beams with
A/q≤30 up to
150 keV/u, followed by an electron stripper and a 106-MHz drift-tube
linac that provides beams fully variable in energy from 150 keV/u to
1.8 MeV/u for ions with A/q≤6. Experimental facilities include the
TRINAT atom trap, the TITAN ion trap, the TUDA detector array, and the
8π, DRAGON, and β-NMR spectrometers.
ISAC-II,
the second stage, employs further stripping and a superconducting linac
(SCL) to boost the ion energy to over 6.5 MeV/u for ions with A/q = 7.
This linac, composed of bulk-niobium quarter-wave rf cavities, is
itself being installed in stages. The first 20 MV of SCL was
commissioned in 2006 and is delivering 3.5 MeV/u beams to experiments;
the final 20 MV will be installed by 2009. An additional low-energy
section is being designed, so that different isotopic beams can be
delivered simultaneously to ISAC-I and ISAC-II experiments. High-energy
experimental facilities include the EMMA and TIGRESS spectrometers, and
the HERACLES detector array. To maintain its competitive edge in beam performance, TRIUMF carries out a variety of advanced accelerator R&D
using state-of-the-art test facilities.
Particularly active areas include isotope-production targets, ion
sources, charge-state boosting via electron cyclotron resonance (ECR),
control of ion beams under strong space-charge forces (using a small
cyclotron), high-field superconducting rf cavities, and beam
diagnostics.
LADD - Laboratory for Advanced Detector Development
LADD is a new institute at UBC/TRIUMF aimed at advanced R&D on detector systems
for particle physics, medical and industrial imaging, condensed matter and other
fields. At LADD, we're currently developing new tracking calorimeters for the
KOPIO particle physics experiment at BNL, as well as medical imaging detectors
for PET and SPECT using liquid xenon as the detection medium
(designed to obtain improved efficiency, reduced exposure, and higher resolution
on images), and devices for ISAC radioactive beam experiments.
Detectors and infrastructure for condensed matter and other experiments are also
planned to make use of the extensive facilities which are presently under development.
Exciting thesis topics involving the invention and development of new detection
devices, electronics, imaging software and many other areas are possible.
Contact Prof. Douglas Bryman (bryman@physics.ubc.ca) for more information on LADD.
The AMPEL building provides world class laboratories for researchers in many different fields.
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AMPEL
is a newer building on campus
that houses a broad range of research in the area of materials, collecting
together faculty and students from the departments of Physics and Astronomy,
Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, and Metals and Materials Engineering.
Several of the Physics and Astronomy Department's researchers in Experimental
Condensed Matter Physics carry out their research in this building. In
addition to the individual research groups' laboratories, the building
houses some major shared facilities; in particular, a recently commissioned
pair of clean rooms with equipment for film preparation and patterning
at sub-micron length scales. There are facilities for crystal growth and
for cutting and polishing samples. In support of all of this materials
growth equipment, there is also a considerable pool of diagnostic equipment
including a rotating anode X-ray machine, Scanning Tunneling microscope,
Atomic Force Microscope, Scanning Electron Microscope, SQUID magnetometer,
and many other pieces of equipment. |
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The Science Division of the Main
UBC Library maintains an outstanding collection of physics books and journals
just a few paces from the Physics and Astronomy Department. Many
of the most commonly requested Physics and Astronomy journals are also available
as e-journals online to registered UBC students and staff, thanks to UBC Library's
extensive collection of electronic subscriptions.
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Main Library and the Clock Tower
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UBC Library
3rd largest research
library in Canada
over 10 million books &
other media
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Koerner library
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In addition to these shared facilities ...
individual research groups maintain a very wide range of equipment which
is available to students interested in pursuing research at UBC. These
include, for example:
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3 He / 4 He Refrigerators
(4
of these) and liquifier
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Molecular Beam Epitaxy Facility
for Semiconductor Growth
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Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (Ultra
High Vacuum)
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X-ray Diffractometers (Rotating
anode and double crystal)
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NMR & ESR Spectrometers
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Magnetron Sputtering Equipment
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Microwave and mm-Wave facilities
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Far-infrared Rapid Scan Fourier
Spectrometers
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Raman Spectrometer
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Very High Resolution infrared interferometers
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Tuneable ring dye laser (visible);
tuneable
infrared diode laser
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Molecular beam apparatus (sub-Doppler
laser studies)
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Hypervelocity Impact Facility
(Two-stage Light-Gas Gun)
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Galactic Radio-Patrol
Facility
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Laser Systems: A great variety of
high power pulsed systems, including femtosecond dye lasers, subpicosecond
C02 and picosecond Nd-YAG lasers, high-intensity nanosecond C02 and Nd-glass
lasers.
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Ultrafast Plasma diagnostics:
Visible-UV streak cameras (2 ps and 10 ps resolution), x-ray streak camera
(10 ps resolution).
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Next Linear Collider Accelerator R&D
Facility
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Beowolf Supercomputing Cluster
Facility
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DNA Sequencing Instrumentation
Facility
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Liquid Mirror Telescope Instrumentation
Facility
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Theory Center Computing Cluster
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Particle Physics Computing Server
Students in the department also have
access to a wide range of other resources, through research links between
UBC and other organizations. These include the possibility of working at
major facilities such as:
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