The Physics Faculty of Gustavus Adolphus College will develop a new junior-level course, Experimental Modern Physics Laboratory. This course will become the capstone laboratory in the sequence of introductory and intermediate classical physics and electronics laboratory courses, required of all majors. The principal goal of the new course is to provide majors with direct experience investigating important microscopic physical phenomena at an advanced undergraduate level using modern instrumentation and data acquisition equipment. The focus of this project is the implementation of new and modernized experiments in nuclear and condensed matter physics and modern optics. The principal units to be developed are: a gamma-ray spectroscopy facility; an alpha-particle spectroscopy facility; a condensed matter (including low temperature) facility; and a set of modern optics experiments. In addition, four IBM PC-XT computers will be used to control experiments and to collect and analyse data.
