Physics
Hands-On Courses
A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY: Hands-on Courses
At Illinois Wesleyan, we know how powerful it can be for physics students to amplify the "theoretical" through actual hands-on lab work. That's why we offer our students such a wide range of upper-level lab courses -- more than almost any other undergraduate institution in the country.
We've seen how access to our top-notch lab equipment, along with supportive guidance from our esteemed faculty in a small class setting amplifies our students' understanding.
Fun in the Laboratory
IWU students find our upper-level labs are much more engaging than other physics labs that they have experienced in the past. Some of them include:
- Modern Physics lab where students verify the predictions of relativity using gamma-ray detectors
- Intermediate Experimental Methods where students directly test quantum mechanics using sensitive instrumentation
- Electronics where students learn to transmit audio signals (music) using light
- Optics where students build interferometers that can measure distances the size of a molecule
- Materials Physics where students become familiar with superconductivity and other exotic states of matter
- Nonlinear Systems & Chaos where students experimentally observe different routes to deterministic chaos in dynamical mechanical, electronic and chemical systems
- Scientific Imaging where students use lasers to see how fluids move around living creatures
- Momentum of the Photon where students perform single-photon measurements, as well as measurements of the energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum transmitted by laser beams
- Experimental Physics where students design and build fully automated experiments on their own---
- Not to mention our offerings involving engineering design where students build working prototypes of new products they've conceived
Click here to schedule a visit.
Click here to apply.
