On-Campus Facilities

Our on-campus labs offer graduate students outstanding opportunities for research. In recent years we have added many all-new labs. 

Our department has two buildings:

Van Allen Hall is an eight-floor building where our department has offices, classes, colloquia, and seminars. Most of our faculty have offices here. Approximately half of our research labs are located in Van Allen Hall.

The Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories (IATL) is a three-floor building with research labs such as the Molecular Beam Epitaxy Facility (MBE) and some of our faculty offices. This building was designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry. Some of our graduate students doing medical physics research use labs in the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, on the West side of the University campus. It is the nation's largest teaching hospital.

Off-Campus Facilities

In addition to our labs in Van Allen Hall and the IATL building, we also use these major facilities:

Accelerators

• CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics)
• Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Observatories

• Major Telescopes:
  • Chandra X-ray Observatory
  • Herschel Space Observatory
  • Hubble Space Telescope
  • Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA)
  • Sloan Digital Sky Survey
  • SWIFT (gamma ray burst mission)
  • VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) Ground-Based TeV Telescope Array
  • Very Large Telescope (VLT) European 8 meter optical telescope
  • Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)
  • XMM-Newton (X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission) Observatory
• Our Own Telescope:
  • Winer Observatory (14 inch robotic telescope in Arizona)

Spacecraft

• Cassini
• Cluster
• Juno
• Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS)
• Mars Express
• Van Allen Probes

UCLA

• Large Plasma Device

Sounding-Rocket Ranges

• Poker Flat Research Range
• White Sands Missile Range