Facilities
Laboratory Facilities in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
The Plasma Physics Laboratory, founded in 1961, is one of the leading university laboratories for the study of plasma physics in the United States. There are four experimental facilities. The Columbia High-Beta Tokamak (HBT-EP) supports the national program to develop controlled fusion energy. It utilizes high voltage, pulsed power systems, and laser and magnetic diagnostics to study the properties of high-beta plasmas and the use of feedback stabilization to increase the achievable beta. A collaborative program with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the DIII-D tokamak group at General Atomics is studying the properties of high-beta plasmas in order to maximize fusion power production in these large, neutral beam-heated tokamaks and spherical tori. The plasma physics group and MIT have jointly constructed Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX), a plasma confinement experiment incorporating a levitated superconducting ring. The Columbia Non-neutral Torus (CNT) is an experiment devoted to the first study of non-neutral plasmas confined on magnetic surfaces. The Columbia Linear Machine (CLM) is a continuously operating, linear mirror device for the study of collisionless plasma instabilities, plasma, transport, and feedback stabilization. Columbia's Collisionless Terrella ExperimenT (CTX) investigates plasma transport in magnetospheric geometry and the generation of strong plasma flow from nonlinear electrostatic potentials.Experimental research in solid-state physics and laser physics is conducted within the Department and also in association with the Columbia Center for Integrated Science and Engineering (CISE) and the Henry Krumb School of Mines. Facilities include laser processing and spectroscopic apparatus, ultrahigh vacuum chambers for surface analysis, picosecond and femtosecond lasers, a molecular beam epitaxy machine, and a clean room that includes photo-lithography and thin film fabrication systems. Within this field, the Laser Diagnostics and Solid-State Physics Laboratory conducts studies in laser spectroscopy of semiconductor thin films and superlattices, and laser diagnostics of thin film processing. The Laser Lab focuses on the study of materials under high pressure, laser surface chemical processing, and new semiconductor structures. Research is also conducted in the shared characterization laboratories and clean room operated by the NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and the NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC).
The Department maintains an extensive network of workstations and desktop computers. The Department has recently acquired a SiCortex supercomputer with 1458 cores which is used for a wide range of departmental computational activities. The research of the Plasma Lab is supported by a dedicated data acquisition/data analysis system, and the applied math group has access to a cluster. Through the Internet, researchers in the Department are currently using supercomputing facilities at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; the San Diego Supercomputing Center; the National Energy Research Supercomputer Center in Berkeley, California; the National Leadership Class Facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the IBM SUR cluster at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York; and others.