Central Teaching Hub
The university has invested heavily in teaching facilities across the campus.
Physics undergraduate laboratory teaching takes place on the ground floor and allows students to perform experiments with modern state of the art equipment much of which is used in industry and research.
The Central Teaching Hub is a unique, multi-disciplinary teaching facility. The state-of-the-art building is located in the heart of the University precinct, where Physics students who previously had separate laboratory classes now have a 30-50% increase in practical work in the first and second years, countering the reducing amount of practical physics in schools and creating greater continuity with third year work.
Computing Facilities
The department has excellent computing infrastructure in place to support its work. The primary computing requirements are served by a distributed system of desktop PCs and laptops, supported by extensive disc storage.
There is also a Tier-2 Grid cluster with over 568 cores and 1.5TB of RAM, and a Tier-3 cluster for both interactive analysis and batch processing that has 9 dedicated 64-bit 8-core nodes and up to 60 shared Linux PCs. The OS on most machines is Scientific Linux 5.
Workshops
The Department of Physics has a well equipped research mechanical workshop including a number of modern computer controlled machines. Much of the equipment needed for our research programme is made here by a team of skilled technical staff. Instruments made in the workshop form part of large international experiments including AGATA, LHC and T2K.
Liverpool Semiconductor Detector Centre
This is a large clean room complex where semiconductor sensors (e.g. silicon) can be assembled into pieces of complex instrumentation. The LSDC is a state of the art facility which makes possible the construction and testing of detector systems for use in experiments at accelerator facilities over the world.
It also enables the group to actively engage in R&D for new detector technologies at future experiments. Detectors have recently been made for the ALTAS and LHCb experiments at CERN and the ALPHA antihydrogen experiment.
Nanomaterials Characterisation Lab
This is a lab investigating surface, interface and nanoscale phenomena related to materials applicable in energy and semiconductor devices.
Medical Teaching and Research Laboratory (MTRL)
The Medical Teaching and Research Laboratory (MTRL) is a unique facility in the UK. It houses a SPECT/CT scanner dedicated to MSc and CPD teaching and research. The scanner at Daresbury is a GE Infinia SPECT gamma camera with Hawkeye single slice CT, manufactured in 2006 and previously in use at St James’ hospital in Leeds.
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