The department is purchasing a laser system to upgrade the undergraduate instructional research and laboratories. The new changes are affecting two distinct courses in the curriculum. One is the laboratory component of a course in physical optics. It is offering new laboratories where the students are assembling, studying, and using pulsed-dye lasers in several optics experiments. Pulsed-dye lasers are good for pedagogical purposes because they are simple to assemble and use, and because they can be set to emit tunable visible radiation in a wide variety of wavelength ranges. The other course is an upper-level laboratory, Advanced Topics and Experiments, which consists of independent research-oriented projects. The new acquisition is improving the projects in the area of atomic physics, involving experiments with Rydberg atoms, that are resulting in the acquisition of original data. The aim of these projects is for students to do semester-long independent research as part of the curriculum. *
