By David Fellingham
As students walk by a door in the basement of the Eyring Science Center with warning labels indicating danger in a beacon of caution and risk, they may wonder what is down there.
There is no reason for students to fear. All the equipment kept in the underground lab is well cared-for and protected, but a careless bump from someone''s passing hand could cost a lot of money.
The physics department keeps millions of dollars worth of equipment in the underground lab, ranging from high-powered lasers and transmission electron microscopes to a reverberation chamber.
Not a lot of universities in the United States have this much equipment, and if they do, very few people ever see it or get to use it.
'Undergraduate students get to use everything down here,' said Dr. Richard Vanfleet of the physics department.
In the late 1960s, BYU built an underground lab to house some of its more sensitive equipment. With the construction of the new Joseph Fielding Smith Building during the last few years, the physics department took advantage of the torn up earth and added a new portion to the underground lab.
The new portion was finished in 2003 and houses the more vibration sensitive equipment.
Vanfleet is in charge of the three microscopes in the lab, which can magnify about 1.1 million times. This level of magnification is close enough to see the rows of atoms in whatever is being looked at.
His current groups of undergraduates are doing research on nanotubes, which have the greatest strength to weight ratio to ever be discovered. Nanotubes are extremely small and require a microscope to see them and their structure.
The equipment in the underground lab is expensive and powerful. Almost everything runs off power supplied by the university. Some of the equipment has its own generators to help give the extra power needed to get the full potential out of the equipment.
To understand the power of the output of the lasers in the lab, people have to think in terms of the sun
'When our laser pulse is focused onto a tiny spot, it reaches intensity of 10^19 watts per square centimeter,' said Dr. Justin Peatross of the BYU physics department. 'That''s the same as concentrating all of the sunlight striking the Earth''s surface onto the head of a pin.'
The acoustics research group uses the reverberation chamber, a three-story room designed to echo for as long as possible.
'If nobody is in there, it will ring for about eight seconds,' said Dr. Scott Sommerfeldt, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Undergraduate students are using the equipment every day to do hands-on research, preparing them for future jobs. This research is abnormal for most colleges. Many colleges do not have this much equipment, and very few allow undergraduates to go near them, let alone use them.
Jeff Farrer, who is in charge of the day-to-day operations of the transmission electron microscopes , recalled when he was going to another school and was not allowed to use the TEM until he was a graduate student. Even then it was limited.
'The professors cared more about research than students,' said Farrer. 'Here at BYU, the professors care about students a lot.'
BYU is in on the leading edge of research done by colleges, and students and faculty alike are doing the research.
Both Vanfleet and Farrer agree that a student would be hard pressed to find a better educational experience to prepare students for a job is physics. The underground lab allows BYU to offers more hands on, out of classroom experience than just about any other college.