Skip to content

Physics & Astrophysics Laboratories (CSH-005)

Summary 🟡 ~

  • Owner Unit: College of Science and Health
  • Sub-unit: Department of Physics and Astrophysics
  • Content Type: infrastructure
  • Campus/Location: Lincoln Park
  • Last Verified: May 30, 2026

Description & capabilities

Department-wide Physics and Astrophysics research infrastructure including x-ray sources, optical tables, lasers, electronics instrumentation, sample preparation, materials/detector testing, and access to shared McGowan instrumentation, machine shop, dedicated laser/FPGA labs (CSH-007), and HPCC for computational workflows.

Observational astrophysics faculty also use external survey archives and user facilities (not campus telescopes): EXT-025 NRAO (VLA/VLBA/GBT; Anuj Sarma), EXT-026 Spitzer/IRSA (historical IRS time, NGC 6334A), and EXT-027 SDSS/ARC (FAST / eBOSS; JesĂşs Pando). NASA Space Grant membership is EXT-028 (Bernhard Beck-Winchatz); ballooning hardware and the ISGC-funded solar telescope sit on CSH-009, not at the consortium office.

Access status

Verification

  • Status: likely (~)
  • Confidence: 80/100
  • Rationale: Physics & Astrophysics department page active; research infrastructure references McGowan and specialized labs.
  • Last verified: 2026-05-30
  • Evidence:
  • Official physics department page
  • Linked CSH-007 laser/FPGA labs in map

Equipment

Find this resource from the Equipment catalog or site search (e.g. “3D printers”, “laser cutter”, “NMR”).

Category Specific equipment
X-ray sources X-ray tube sources
Optical tables and laser optics Optical tables; Department lasers (general optics research)
Electronics benches and prototyping Electronics instrumentation (department)
Sample preparation (lab) Sample preparation areas
Materials and detector testing Materials and detector testing infrastructure

Equipment access (via linked resources)

Resource Notes
CSH-001 McGowan-South core instrumentation (spectrometry, chromatography, NMR) and chemistry machine shop
CSH-007 Femtosecond laser and FPGA/electronics laboratories (beamline instrumentation development)
CDM-014 HPCC GPU compute for image analysis, model fitting, and ML workflow development
EXT-025 NRAO user facilities (VLA, VLBA, GBT) — DePaul radio-astronomy observing, not campus inventory
EXT-026 NASA Spitzer / IRSA archive — historical IRS guest-observer data, not campus inventory
EXT-027 SDSS / ARC survey catalogs (FAST / eBOSS) — cosmology data access, not campus inventory
CSH-009 STEM Center high-altitude ballooning and ISGC-funded solar telescope (Physics faculty launches)

Source: CSH Physics & Astrophysics; grant facilities narrative (May 2026). Last verified: July 29, 2026.

Contacts (resource-level)

Last verified: May 28, 2026.

People & contacts

Named contacts from the people registry when publicly documented.

Source URL

Official links and email are listed under Contacts above.

Documented Relationships

Uses CSH-001 McGowan instrumentation and machine shop; hosts or connects to CSH-007 laser/FPGA labs; uses CDM-014 HPCC for image analysis and ML pipelines. External user-facility partners: EXT-003 (APS), EXT-004 (ALCF), EXT-025 (NRAO), EXT-026 (Spitzer/IRSA), EXT-027 (SDSS). NASA Space Grant consortium: EXT-028.

Linked Relationship IDs

Notes

Department facilities partially documented via grant facilities narrative (May 2026); verify against public Physics pages when updated.