The Physics student lounge is located in Northside, room NS 350.
This is on the third floor of Northside in the northeast section of the building.
See the map on the wall beside main elevator for exact room location.
Hours:
Monday-Friday
8:00am - 5:00pm
(There may be exceptions with extended hours.)
Student amenities include:
2 working tables
2 computers
1 printer
The CTS Corporation Scholarships in Physics were established through a gift from the CTS Corporation Foundation. Recipients must be physics majors studying full time at IU South Bend. The CTS Freshman Scholarship provides at least $1000 of support for a freshman physics major, while the CTS Continuing Student Scholarships provide at least $500 of support for physics majors beyond their freshman year.
Applications for the CTS Freshman Scholarship now make use of IU South Bend's Online Scholarship Application (OSA). The OSA is available beginning October 1st each year and is due March 1st each year.
Information regarding the CTS Continuing Scholarship, including the deadline to be considered for the upcoming academic year, will be sent to physics majors each year in late winter / early spring.
To apply for the CTS Continuing Scholarship, students should complete the Online Scholarship Application, and they should also ask two faculty members familiar with their work in college/university science or math classes to write a letter of recommendation.
Undergraduate research is a key component of our physics curriculum. All of our students gain research experience either by working closely with a faculty member on an original project here at IU South Bend or by participating in an NSF REU program at another university. Students present their work in a variety of venues, such as our Contemporary Physics Seminar (PHYS-S 106), the IU South Bend Undergraduate Research Conference, or professional conferences, and in some cases students become coauthors on peer-reviewed journal articles. Below are brief descriptions of the active research programs available to students at IU South Bend.
Astro-Particle Physics
IU South Bend’s Astroparticle group is focused mainly on the experimental search for dark matter. The two experiments (PICASSO & COUPP) we collaborate on have now merged into the PICO collaboration, which is using the bubble chamber technique to search for evidence of these elusive particles. IU South Bend has designed and fabricated hundreds of ultrasonic transducers, which have been able to distinguish radioactive background from the signal being searched for. We have also had students make numerous contributions to the bubble chamber experiments on aspects of the chemistry of the detector, installation and commissioning of detectors at Fermilab and the deep underground site at SNOLAB (in Ontario, Canada), as well as analyzing the dark matter search data itself. Our group has also aided other experiments such as an astrophysics experiment studying massive stars, the new muon accelerator (MICE) at Fermilab, a competing dark matter experiment, as well as a cold neutron experiment..
High-Pressure Condensed Matter Physics
IU South Bend is a member institution of COMPRES: COnsortium for Materials Properties Research in Earth Sciences, and we are actively involved in experimental research at high pressure. Our mineral physics laboratory uses Diamond Anvil Cells (DACs) coupled with laser and synchrotron radiation to generate and investigate the pressure and temperature conditions found deep inside the Earth and other planets. We are also interested in the role of pressure, as a thermodynamic variable, for basic physics, chemistry and materials science.
Nuclear Physics
Nuclear physics research at IU South Bend primarily utilizes the accelerator facilities at Notre Dame's Nuclear Structure Laboratory and the National Superconducting Cyclotron Facility at Michigan State University. Our research focuses on reactions induced by radioactive beams and reactions of astrophysical interest. IU South Bend is a "Participating College" of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA).
String Theory
Research in String Theory at IU South Bend focuses on Calabi-Yau compactification and mirror symmetry. We use methods from arithmetic geometry to investigate the relationship between Calabi-Yau manifolds and exactly solvable models.
