Research Facilities

The instrument shop at the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy has supported the experimental research needs of the department for a century. This facility has designed, built and collaborated on a wide variety of apparatus including, but not limited to: High Energy Physics work on DØ, Higgs Boson, and Monopole detector systems; Atomic Molecular scattering systems — Electron-Photon Coincidence, Electric Dipole Moment, Cold Atom systems; UHV chambers and associated hardware; Thin film sputtering systems; High Pressure (100,000 PSI) systems, Electro-mechanical drive and control; Furnace construction and PID control; Telescope repair.

This facility also supports the physical research needs of other University departments including the Health Science Center and has done independent work for the U. S. Air Force, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Brookhaven National Lab.

The University of Oklahoma recently (2013) signed a 3-year lease with the Astrophysical Research Consortium, providing undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, and faculty in the department with access to the 0.5m and 3.5m telescopes at Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, NM. Both the 0.5m and 3.5m can be remotely operated from our offices in Nielsen Hall, and a full description of the instrumentation available on each telescope is available here at our full telescope description page.

OU Library: The Bizzell Memorial Library below is located nearly adjacent to our building.

Engineering Library: A branch library of interest to members of our department.

History of Science Collection: The main library houses an internationally known collection of scientific manuscripts.

The computing resources in our building include a 32-node Apple cluster, and a set of 140 cores running Grid software for the High Energy Physics group. The facilities also include a PC lab for the College of Arts and Sciences, a graduate student lab of Linux workstations, as well as faculty workstations. The latter two groups together provide 163 cores for our departmental Condor pool, which has a peak throughput of 300 GFLOPS.

Large scale computations are performed on the Oklahoma Supercomputing Center for Education and Research (OSCER). OSCER has been developed cooperatively by over 750 researchers (faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduates), in 26 academic departments within six colleges at OU’s 3 campuses (Norman, Health Sciences Center, Tulsa), with oversight by OU’s Chief Information Officer.

OSCER recently completed deployment of a Dell cluster supercomputer, Boomer, consisting of 435 compute nodes, a mix of PowerEdge R620 and PowerEdge R720, 352 of which are centrally owned (funded via OU IT internal budget) and 83 of which are “condominium” nodes that have been purchased by research teams at OU’s Norman and Health Sciences Center campuses. The aggregate peak speed is 111.6 TFLOPs (trillions of floating point operations per second), with 6992 cores, 15,680 GB of RAM and approximately 360 TB of globally accessible disk

ASAS-SN currently consists of 20 14cm telescopes, distributed around the globe at premier astronomical observatories. These telescopes allow surveying the entire visible sky every night, making the ASAS-SN network much less sensitive to weather conditions. ASAS-SN network is able to study variable objects or transients brighter than 18th magnitude in g-band, including supernovae, active galactic nuclei, variable stars, and others.

OU is an individual member of ASAS-SN till 2022. 

For more information, see: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~assassin/index.shtml