The Applied Physics Laboratory

Aided by a grant of $100,000 from Nortel, the Department of Physics opened the Nortel Applied Physics Laboratory in January 1997. It is primarily used by our upper year undergraduate Physics specialists and majors.

The laboratory has 16 stations, each networked to our central UNIX server. Each station consists of:

• A 133 MHz Pentium PC with a 17 inch color monitor, ethernet card, and an IEEE-488 card for process control and data acquisition.
• A oscilloscope, power supply, signal generator and meter, all on the IEEE-488 bus so they may be controlled and/or read by the PC.
• LabVIEW process control and data acquisition software from National Instruments.
• Mathematica front end software communicating with the Mathematica kernel running on our central UNIX server.
• Maple software.
• X-terminal emulation software from Starnet Communications Corp.
• Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser.

The courses that make heaviest use of the laboratory are:

• PHY225H - Fundamental Physics Laboratory.
• PHY305F/405H - Electronics Laboratory.
• PHY307H/407H - Introduction to Computational Physics.
• PHY308H/408H - Time Series Analysis.
• PHY309/409 - Quantum Methods Using Computer Algebra.
• PHY325/326/425/426 - Modern Physics Laboratory.
• PHY406H - Computer and Interface Systems Laboratory.

When not in use by these courses, the laboratory is used for general purpose undergraduate computation.

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