On-campus Labs

Professor Merlino, left, with graduate student Eric Agrimson and a Q-machine that they use together with Professor D'Angelo. A Q-machine is a device with a solenoidal magnetic field to confine a potassium plasma with very little turbulence.	Graduate student Eric Agrimson standing above a Q-machine in the other lab of Professors Merlino and D'Angelo. Electrostatic waves in this plasma are similar to those in the Earth's ionosphere.	Graduate student Eric Agrimson, left, with Professor D'Angelo, center, and an engineer, installing a part for a Q-machine's water cooling.
Professor Skiff, right, with graduate student Ilker Uzun. They launch ion waves in a plasma, and detect them using laser-induced fluorescence. They examine their results for evidence of nonlinear processes such as three-wave mixing and chaos.	Professor Skiff, right, with graduate students. Their plasma device has a highly uniform magnetic field. A radio-frequency source generates an argon plasma.	Professor Skiff, right, with group members, in the laser room that adjoins their plasma lab. A tunable dye laser has an adjustable wavelength, allowing experimenters to use the Doppler effect to measure how many ions are moving at a given velocity. This optical technique is their primary method of measurement.
Professor Goree, right, with group members in a lab where dusty plasmas are studied. A dusty plasma contains small particles of solid matter, which have a large electric charge.	Members of Professor Goree's group setting up an experiment with dusty plasmas. The charged particles arrange themselves in a regular pattern, like atom in a crystalline lattice, so that the dusty plasma can be used to study condensed matter problems.	An engineer in Professor Goree's group, with flight hardware built to fly on NASA's KC-135 airplane. By flying with a parabolic trajectory, the pilot can create weightlessness conditions for the experimenters. A dusty plasma is formed in a vacuum vessel; it is illuminated with diode lasers and imaged with video cameras.
A graduate student in one of Professor Kletzing's labs, using a plasma to treat the surface of a detector component.	Professor Kletzing, right, with a graduate student, center, and a research scientist, left, in their electronics lab. They build all the electronic and mechanical components of electron detectors that fly on sounding rockets.	A detector for sounding rocket experiments, in one of Professor Kletzing's labs. The sounding rocket flies through the Earth's aurora, which is a plasma produced by energetic electrons striking the upper part of the Earth's atmosphere.

Last updated July 25, 2003. © The University of Iowa 2003. All rights reserved. Contact information. Send questions or comments to the webmaster. The Department of Physics and Astronomy is a part of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.