Departmental Research

The faculty in the physics department are involved in a significant amount of applied research, and because we have no graduate students, our undergraduates almost always play a significant role. Our work has been supported by grants and loans from NASA, 3M, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, the United States Air Force, the McKnight Foundation, the Blandin Foundation, Calspan Corporation, and the American Physical Society. Dozens of students have been positively impacted by this chance to work directly with faculty members doing publishable physics and engineering research. Since 1998, we have published or presented 88 papers with 26 student co-authors.

Our research laboratories are particularly well-equipped in the areas of modern optics and laser physics. In recent years our department has been nationally recognized on several occasions. We have won an award in a national competition in Washington for an apparatus, built by three students and one professor, which measures object velocities using the Doppler shift of laser light. Our development of unique optics experiments has been well documented in papers and notebooks so that they can be replicated at other colleges and universities. In fact, the National Science Foundation has financed the professional videotape production of seven of our optics experiments.

Not only are there research opportunities at Bethel, but we also place students in external research environments. We probably average about half a dozen students at a time working for 3M, two at Medtronic, and another four at Logic Product Development. In addition, there have been six students who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a summer or a semester (or both), one student who spent a semester at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, another who was one of five students from the U.S. to receive a summer fellowship at CERN (Switzerland), and another who spent two summers at Argonne National Laboratory. Most were supported financially by prestigious SERS awards from the U.S. Department of Energy.